Abstract

Education is one of the key factors for citizenship and democratic development. In whatever manner they are understood, both are consolidated in values and competencies of individuals, and in the practices of cooperation and conflict characterizing their collective actions and the institutions they establish by political means. From any of these perspectives, the formative sequence of six, ten or twelve years offered by compulsory schooling in the various countries of Latin America is of great importance. It is at school that the practical implications of different concepts of freedom and authority combine for the first time, and students can have access to visions of society, a break with the unconditional nature of the home, and to an ‘us’, extensive or restricted, which is the basis of civic life (Crick 2003; Peña 2007). For the school institution provides the first opportunity for the sustained meeting with an ‘others’, real or imagined, more extensive than the family or the immediate community, and in so doing provides the most basic of conditions for cooperation between the different, which, since Aristotle, has been the hallmark of the political method of construction of order (Crick 1962).