EDUCAÇÃO EM RUÍNAS?

UMA LEITURA ARENDTIANA SOBRE A VIOLÊNCIA CONTRA AS ESCOLAS NO BRASIL

Abstract

This text presents an overview of the doctoral dissertation entitled School Massacres in Brazil: Extreme Violence Against Schools from an Arendtian Perspective, developed within the Graduate Program in Education at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE). The general objective of the research was to understand the concept of violence in Hannah Arendt's thought and its contribution to the analysis of extreme violence against schools in the contemporary Brazilian context. Methodologically, the study is bibliographic and hermeneutic in nature, articulating—through an essayistic approach—Arendtian concepts such as modernity, violence, the common world, the banality of evil, superfluity, forgiveness, and promise, among others, with the reality of school massacres that have occurred in Brazil over the past two decades. Based on the concept of "violence against the school," proposed by Charlot (2008), the research sought to understand how attacks on educational spaces reflect the crisis of authority, the erosion of the public sphere, and the weakening of the common world. The findings indicate that such violent events are not isolated incidents, but rather expressions of the disintegration of political and symbolic structures that sustain the school as a space for human formation. Furthermore, the study suggests that Arendt’s thought provides important interpretative tools for analyzing the roots of this type of violence, while also offering ethical-political paths for rebuilding the school as a space of protection for the younger generations. In this sense, defending the school implies a collective responsibility shared by the entire political community, in which forgiveness and promise emerge as possible categories to address the traumas of violence and preserve a common world for the generations to come.