The Colonization of School by Instrumental Rationality

Abstract

The article, of a reflective nature, assumes that the school organization was not able to remain immune to the hegemony of instrumental rationality, the same that is also felt in other areas of human activity, so our purpose aimed to reveal its reconfiguration and resemantization as mechanisms that legitimize and naturalize it, intensifying the bureaucracy of which it is an expression. In this sense, we emphasize the centrality of computer platforms as a mechanism for intensifying control, at the same time that the hierarchy in terms of decision-making is intensified, validating the idea that educational actors are instrumentalized by converting themselves into means of pursuing organizational goals. We account for a mercantile perspective included in the concept of quality, which is measured in terms of results and competition that acquires the status of pedagogical education, as it serves the purpose of increasing efficiency. Alongside these aspects, we consider the issue of the school director, as we recognize his approach to the figure of the technocratic manager, and the school grouping as a response to an administrative and rationalizing logic. We allude to Freire, Dewey and Illich for their refusal of an education that, instead of emancipating, tames and instrumentalizes.