Public Policies and Children’s Participation Manuel Jacinto Sarmento, Natália Fernandes Soares and Catarina Tomás (Institute of Child Studies of University of Minho)

Introduction

Childhood history has been characterised, over the past few centuries, by the successive

exclusion of influential aspects of social life, such as work, bonding with adults outside

the family, participating in community and political life. According to the diffuse,

comprehensive, and, sometimes, contrasting historiography of childhood, there is a

certain element which has produced a social reality that might characterise childhood’s

status, from early modernity on: the separation between the world of childhood and the

world of adults, the differentiation between areas of activity, exclusively adult-oriented

and, consequently, out of the child’s reach, and the direct (specially in the family

context) or institutional (specially in the school context) placement of children under

adults protection (e.g. Ariès, 1973; Heywood, 19XX; Bechi & Julia, 1986). As a

consequence of childhood’s confinement to a socially conditioned and controlled

category, there was a restriction of political rights. After years of major struggles,

advances followed by setbacks, large-scale civic movements, serious conflict and

confrontations, which took place mainly in the early 20th century, the right to political

participation, specially expressed in the form of a representative selection of political

leaders, has been successively attributed, particularly in Europe and North America, to

the head of the family, to every white male, illiterate people, women, blacks and

ethnical minorities, immigrants and young people over 18 (and, occasionally, to young

people over 16). Children remain the only social group totally deprived from any

explicit political rights. It is worth mentioning that this reality, which characterises

western modernity, is not in any way a universal truth. Societies and communities in the

east and southern hemisphere, and even some ethnical minority groups throughout

Europe, do not exclude children from collective life. On the contrary, they are actually

included in assemblies and decision-making collective spaces, where they can have a

substantive civic participation. (e.g. Silva, Macedo & Nunes, 2001).

It is not the authors’ intention to support the attribution of the right to vote to children.

This kind of debate clearly needs to be contextualised in the light of the renewal of

democracy.

What matters, here, is to stress the fact that children who are deprived of their political

rights, as a result of their forced absence from the political scene (government,

parliament, town halls, etc.) tend to be invisible as political actors. In fact, deprivation

of political rights is not synonymous with absence in the political life. The history of all

social groups successively included in the group of citizens with political rights –

namely women and the citizens deprived from civic rights who have been responsible

for large-scale political and social movements in the early decades of the 20th century

and in the 1960’s, in the USA and Europe – is the ultimate proof of participation

without legitimate acknowledgement. The participation, both individual and collective,

is beyond all legal restraint of western representative democracies. Consequently, we

are not talking about absence but invisibility in politics.

This invisibility is, to some extent, similar to ignoring the political impacts on different

generations, especially children. By not having the right to vote, or to be elected,

children are kept out of the referential structure of political targets, might they be

“citizens”, “tax payers”, “patricians” or even “people”. Nonetheless, every political

measure affects generations in different ways (Qvortrup, 1994). In that case, invisibility

is homologous with exclusion: children are the generational group the most affected by

poverty, social inequalities and poor public policies (e.g. Annan, 2002). Consequently,

is does not come as a surprise the fact that excluding children from direct political

action is similar to making them invisible from a political point of view.

The present text seeks to meet halfway with the efforts to renew the critical theory, by

adopting a cosmopolitical perspective (Beck, 2003; Santos, 20xx) and by decisively

incorporating a perspective that includes the globalised society, and refuses an

ethnocentric or particularist approach. It manages to do so by trying to interpret the

social and historical factors which have made childhood invisible in what concerns

political debate, and by seeking, at the same time, to deconstruct any views based on an

adult-centered vision, which has been the basis for modern sciences devoted to

childhood. We shall start by discussing the reasons for hiding children’s political action

and for denying them the political right to participate. Then, we shall, successively,

focus on the global, local and institutional levels of political action, by using the data

gathered from ongoing researches concerning these three areas, about children’s

political competencies.

Childhood and public policies – a critical perspective

There are a number of factors which might justify the refusal to understand children as

social actors with political competencies. Those factors, though resulting from different

historical moments and truly differentiated situations, are quite articulated and

combined.

In the first place, there is the modern notion of citizenship. After the Enlightenment

philosophy and the political configuration attributed to modern states by the democratic

revolutions of the 18th century, citizenship became the legal background for the

“official identity” of the members of a community with the supreme skill to self-ruling.

By definition, citizenship corresponds to a political status, confined to national territory,

although the citizen is considered to be part of the community, not only because of the

bond between them, and which grants him certain civic and political rights, but also

because of his own individual status, which entrusts him with social individual rights

(protection, nourishment, education, health care, etc.). At the same time, the status of

member implies certain obligations and duties towards the community.

Within this liberal tradition, citizenship is usually referred to – especially after T.

Marshall (1965) – as civil (the right to individual freedom, to expression, thought, belief,

individual ownership and to access justice), political (the right to elect and to be elected

and to participate in organizations and political parties) and social citizenship

(individual access to basic social services). Marshall advocates an evolutionist concept

of these three kinds of citizenship. In fact, he considers each one of them as a sequential

stage capable of broadening the range of whatever was previously granted to citizens.

This evolutionist sequenciality is responsible for much of the current controversy in

contemporary debate (e.g. Wexler, 1990), as well as for confining citizenship to a

strictly national range (Beck, 2003). On the other hand, it is certainly not clear that

society has evolved towards the broadening of rights; or, for that matter, that the rights

have extended to everyone.

As far as we are concerned, this liberal concept of citizenship, of which Marshall is one

of the most reputed interpreters and promoters, is based on the assumption that the

individual is somehow attached to the community (national) and that this attachment is

related to generally accepted civilizational principles. That is, supposing he was

endowed with free will, reason and sense of solidarity. The lack of social consensus

about these three assumptions (in fact, and as you shall see later, the paternalist control

expressed in contemporary regulation-oriented social concepts of childhood, states that

children lack free will and reason and that they are socially immature) legitimises the

refusal to accept children’s citizenship, at least a full political citizenship and a partial

civil citizenship.

In short, a classic concept of citizenship refuses children a political status. In fact, this is

not the only thing to be refused; the idea, after considering childhood as a minority (not

just age-related but also from a civic point of view), is to grant access to full citizenship,

which is not just about age, but also results from the compulsive attendance of

institutions whose proclaimed mission consists, precisely, of preparing for citizenship –

the school. As an institutional space where all the equalitarian utopias fit, as well as the

most sophisticated processes of control, the school has been considered by modernity as

the place for training young citizens, who have rights of their own, skills and

competence to compete and/or take care of each other in a society that offers equal

opportunities for everyone. It is pointless to remind you of how the linear idea about

school as a “citizen factory” has resulted in so many mistakes and has made us waste so

much energy, which could be used to construct full citizenship. The reference made to

the “decline of the school’s institutional program” (Dubet, 2000) is enough to reveal

how “citizen training” is a pale substitute for effective citizenship. On the other hand,

the school corresponds to the historical institutionalisation of childhood-oriented

disciplinarisation processes (Foucault, 1993), which are inherent to the construction of a

prevailing social order. Nevertheless, school remains a space for conflict between

political and pedagogical projects that may either be oriented towards the real

broadening of rights, or to build on actions that perpetuate the historical inscription of

control (cf. Sarmento, 2000).

At the same time that modernity introduced school as a requirement to access

citizenship, it separated children from the public sphere. Children are seen as citizens of

the future; they are, currently, excluded from collective conviviality, except when it

comes to school, and shielded from a full societal experience by their families.

Childhood’s “privatisation” (Wyness et al., 2004), is nothing more than an attempt to

protect children, as well as an act of subordination to a paternalist regime. The idea of a

child with a rather busy schedule, who leaves home to go to school and who leaves

school to innumerable other extra-curricular activities, which range between foreign

language classes and ballet, computer club and any kind of sports, perfectly portrays

something which depends on and is controlled by adults, that is to say, as a true

custodial extension of familial power which has, now, been expanded to services

agencies dedicated to keep children busy (Scratton, 1997).

It is obvious that keeping children safe, as well as the undeniable progresses of

modernity, has assured, even if partially, a big improvement on most children’s life

conditions. On the other hand, there were enormous advances in what concerns such

indicators as child mortality rates, the liberation from oppressive and ignominious forms

of labour, enjoying information and written culture and the access to basic living

standards (education, health care, housing). Nevertheless, we should stress that those

advances do not apply to all the children in the world. The available data shows us that

world-wide social inequalities affect particularly (causing even greater damages)

deprived and poor children from countries and social groups (in that case, even in

developing countries), with the biggest social and economic needs (UNICEF, 2005).

However, a price to pay was precisely the loss of interest in children’s moral status

(Mayall, 2002). Childhood may be considered a “minority social group” (idem) just

because it is deprived from the necessary requirements to achieve full social attachment

to the rest of society. The political invisibility of children is an extension of this process.

There are a few factors which have played a significant role in this, namely symbolic

ways of administering childhood, generated and developed by society (Popkewitz,

2000; Sarmento, 2003), and some institutional knowledge which has induced the need

to hide the children as autonomous and competent social actors (James, Jenks & Prout,

1998).

The redefinition of children’s citizenship results from the paradigmatic change in

childhood’s concept, the development of a renewed legal concept, mainly expressed

through the Convention on the Rights of the Child, in 1989, and from the societal

process related to the broadening of the ways of citizenship, through an assertive and

counter hegemonic action, usually performed by childhood-centered agents and non-

government organizations. Consequently, this redefinition, besides from being

ambiguous, is also a non pacific and ongoing process. Nonetheless, it is, undoubtedly,

one of the most promising possibilities to interpret children’s social bonds.

In this sense, children’s citizenship goes beyond any traditional concepts, since it

requires the rights to be exercised in the worlds of life, without depending necessarily

on the mechanisms at the disposal of representative democracies (even though this fact

does not make them any less important). That is to say, acknowledging the right to

citizenship – where children’s participation plays an increasingly significant role – does

not imply a lower demand level of protection of children by adults, namely their

families and the state… The key to children’s best interest resides in the balance

between these two categories – protection and participation. (Archard, 2003).

This is why we think it would be wise to evaluate the sense and the possibilities of

children participation in social life. What is at stake here is not only the chance to make

children visible as public policies recipients, but also to make them fully take on their

condition as peculiar politicians.

Children’s social participation

If we were to consider participation as a process of social interaction which results in

the construction of collective spaces, we should also consider that children’s

participatory competencies are indelibly connected – either constrained, or stimulated –

to personal relationships established with others – family, friends, community, etc. –

and to the social, economical and cultural structures: educational and social agency

services, political structures and others, which are part of their social and cultural

worlds. We should also consider the influence of different obstacles or incentives to the

promotion of children’s participation in restricted and broader contexts. We can initially

state that children’s participation in the restricted context of personal relationships,

whether they are adults or children, is somewhat restrained by factors resulting from

power and hierarchy relationships between them. Therefore, to consider children’s

participation in the public sphere requires that we take into consideration the influence

of structures that exist around it, might they be educational, legal or social. They present

themselves invariably as unknown and distant structures, which obstruct the creation of

spaces dedicated to children’s participation.

In reference to this, Horelli (1998) mentions that the chances for children to participate

in the transformation of the public sphere are almost non-existent, and that the literature

that portrays children’s participation practices is also scarce.

Chawla (1997) himself, the author of the research named “Growing up in cities”,

supports the idea that there is a persistent culture of marginalisation towards children

regarding their chances of participation in the public sphere. He also considers that

children and young people have the necessary skills to contribute in an innovative way

to the improvement of the social environments they live in, but that the way adults’

social order interprets this possibility diminishes those same skills. The decision-making

process concerning the organisation of the public sphere is surrounded by barriers

related to technocratic language and styles of negotiation for planning spaces which do

not consider plausible or desirable the inclusion of children’s voices.

This is why the study about something exceptional, not quite visible or marginalised,

like children’s political participation, is particularly significant. The somewhat

secondary role of children’s participation in the public sphere does not erase its

importance and meaning, right on the contrary. It is in this “peripheral” kind of

citizenship that children’s significant ways of expression take place. But they are not

only significant because they contradict the prevailing concept of a generation

withdrawn from the civic sphere and with no political skills whatsoever, but also

because they allow us an analysis on politics in all its dimensions, since the one run on

children’s participation adds yet another element to the understanding of political

phenomena: precisely what results from the specificity of generational relationships –

and, in particular, from the intergenerational relationships between adults and children

(Alanen & Mayall, 20xx) – along the planning of the public sphere.

In that sense, we shall immediately introduce some of the contributions made by

ongoing researches about three significant areas of children’s political action: social

movements involving children, local intervention and the political and educational

action in public school.

Political participation: areas and interventions

Social movements

From a symbolic point of view, the rights of the child represent one of the most vivid

memories of struggle and claim in favour of one of the most vulnerable and excluded

social groups in the history of mankind. In spite of all the limitations and criticism

around it, the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), as well as the entire

legislation and legal mechanisms related to children, are a sign of citizenship, a sign of

children’s ability to have their own rights, and a sign of recognition of their

participatory skills.

From all the different actors involved in the process, the social movements of children

(SMC’s) strike us as rather singular, since their praxis recovers, symbolically speaking,

the concept of generational emancipation and builds a road straight to children’s

citizenship, namely through the “singular nature of childhood’s experience within a

social movement” (Correia et al., 2004: 12).

Including children in the debate on globalisation and winning over some claiming space

could be characterised as “telescopic inclusion and macroscopic exclusion practices”

(Marçal, 2002:54). However, and due to some changes that have occurred over the last

few decades, it would be wise to say that the current situation deserves a closer look.

We are able to identify and enumerate emancipatory mechanisms, experiences,

initiatives and struggles concerning the rights of the child. This seems to contribute to a

progressive, even if slow and troubled, inclusion of children in the world’s social and

political agendas.

Some of these social movements of children (SMC’s) include the movements of

working children and youths in Africa, Asia and Latin America; first in Latin America

in the late 1970’s, and in Africa and Asia, in the 1990’s; the Movimento dos Sem

Terrinha/The Little Landless (Brazil) or the Movimento Nacional de Meninos e

Meninas de Rua (MNMMR)/ National Movement of Street Boys and Girls.

The sociological literature on social movements claims that these same movements are

successful when able to influence political agendas and, consequently, social practices,

because the group is acknowledged as a political actor (Cohen, 1985:675). With regard

to the social movements of children, though diverse and heterogeneous, the

manifestations of collective action against (perpetual) injustices against children and the

defence and promotion of their rights, are evident in the objective distribution of the

globalisation effects and the different discourses which adopt different perspectives of

the world, of children and childhood. Therefore, we can say that here lies some of the

biggest challenges to children’s cosmopolitism: their participation in democracy and the

transnationalisation of strong and interactive movements of children. In a world more

and more complex it makes all sense to actively seek the reciprocal acknowledgement

among different social actors, in order to catalyse common goals and efforts, what B.S.

Santos (2003a) calls theory of translation and equivalence.

Children’s movements, associations, struggles and claims rather than being supported

by models based on potentially general, linear and decontextualised analysis, must be

reviewed in the light of the structurally uneven access to power, of economic assets and

symbolic resources, of the uneven social and economic redistribution, of the inequality

amongst social groups, of the uneven power relationships between nation-states and

social groups (Fraser, 1992; Chomsky, 1999). The SMC’s take place in three different

space-time categories: transnationally, nationally and locally. Nevertheless, because

many of these networks of strategic action, which help construct and transform

children’s reality, work according to a particular and local scale, they ultimately get

“trapped in scales which prevent them from being credible alternatives to more global

ones [dominant scale logics]” (Santos, 2003b:745). Besides, the struggle of the SMC’s

against discrimination, abuse, and negligence takes place mainly in a local/national and

daily basis, i.e., it is a more reactive than proactive kind of struggle.

As collective action contexts, social movements promote a collective mobilisation of

individual rights. So, we can state for sure that we stand before a broader

conceptualisation of rights. Since thousands of children, today, are living on the margin

of a full social inclusion and market values overcome the child’s needs and the new

forms of democracy, this notion of rights of the child promotes a distinct articulation

from the one that is currently prevalent. That is why individual rights have a better

defence when they are included in collective actions. This happens especially when we

refer to socially marginalised children, who are victims of poverty, abandonment,

exclusion and/or exploitation. The point about children’s collective movements is not

the fact that their main priority are those same social factors (other movements, political

parties and non-government organisations also do it), but rather that they are based on

children’s political action, and their participation (even if often symbolic) is considered

to be essential to improve their life conditions, their families’ and communities’, to

discuss new kinds of relationships between adults and children, to contribute with new

ways of knowledge about childhood, to create participation spaces and to contribute to

the discussion of “representative democracy versus participative democracy”. The

public dimension is vital and must be reviewed and considered, especially because there

are social movements being dragged into this symbolic struggle. Some events are

perfect examples of that, such as the Children’s Forum (New York, 2002), the Foro d’

Niños – the First Social Forum of Mallorca (Spain, 2003), the World Social Forum and

the ForumZinho Social Mundial, which has, since 2002, been taking place as a parallel

event of WSF.

By insisting on struggling and claiming, children manage to bring to the political arena

some of the issues which, until recently, were on the margin of discussion. Because

alternative interpretations of their needs were offered some of the lines between public

and private were crossed. Since those lines are increasingly thinner they presuppose

some kind of risk-taking on the part of the SMC’s, namely winning over new spaces

and emancipation or a stricter regulation; and the risk of cannibalising the specificities

of childhood’s social and cultural worlds through the ideological emptying of discourses

about children’s participation. We are not talking, here, about assimilating, about

creating artificial spaces for children, some kind of bubbles which can keep them apart

from society. We are talking about acknowledging children and their movements their

rights and specificities while struggling for a social transformation.

This is, to a great extent, the true sense of these movements’ collective action and the

dilemmas they are up against.

Local intervention

If the SMC’s are the most consistent form of political intervention involving children in

a global range, children’s political action is, locally, making a stand (Wyness et al.,

2004). In this section, we shall characterise the local intervention of children within the

structure in charge of coordinating policies and intervening at municipality level.

The project is being developed in Braga, a city in the north of Portugal, with a

population of around 150 000 inhabitants, and aims to promote the participation of

children in the public sphere. It is included in an initiative called “Rede Social/Social

Network”, first appeared in Portugal in 1997, aimed at promoting active social policies

based on the empowerment and mobilisation of society, as a whole, and of each

individual towards an effort to fight off poverty and social exclusion.

In what concerns the municipality of Braga and the definition of its Social Development

Plan, the established strategic goal was the absolute need to promote the child’s image

as someone with rights, by expanding the services network and equipments, through the

mobilisation of a set of participants and the creation of mechanisms which can assure

their access to resources, assets and services.

After having defined and promoted the child as a social actor, as someone with rights of

his own, namely the right to participation, it was also made clear in the above

mentioned Social Development Plan, as one of its specific goals, the need to create and

develop a local participation space at municipality level.

Resulting from these assumptions there are some strategies which have been developed

in order to make them work. Here is a record of one of them. In the school year

2003/2004, the children of the municipality were asked to participate in the

development of a poster for divulging their rights to adults. With that purpose in mind,

all the schools with children aged 3 to 10 received a poster by UNICEF which

mentioned the rights consecrated in the CRC. This poster helped divulging and

informing children about their own rights.

Teachers and early childhood educators received some information in order to work

with the children about their rights and to give them room to create their own poster.

The poster should help them disclose what they really think is important and, at the

same time, help adults become aware of children’s rights.

In order to select the winning poster, they organised a jury composed of adults, but also

children. Posters were chosen and children attended a public session on the Universal

Children’s Day, June 1, where they were able to present their claims and standpoints

about a city that attributes rights. The local authorities were present and played

intermediate to those claims. The project is still at work by making children’s

participation possible. Everyone’s wish is for children to become an active, alert and

permanent presence in the construction of the urban public sphere, by mobilising their

voices through the developed structures and according to flexible screening methods for

determining what they think and how do they keep track of their own propositions and

claims.

In that sense, participation is not aimed to contest municipal adults’ institutions of

political participation (namely local parliaments or consultive committees), but to find

out, using for that matter intervening imagination, some ways of participation

compatible with childhood cultures, new communication tools which allow you to be

alerted to the way the child expresses himself (hence, for instance, the importance of

drawing and of the poster as a form of expression) and dialogue channels with the

powers that be, either through an assertive view of claim, or through a perspective of

follow-up and direct dialogue.

In short, it is possible, using strategies like the ones mentioned above, to mobilise and

involve children in participation processes about the issues that concern them, by

considering them social actors with enough skills to develop meaningful social actions,

throughout the various interactions they establish with other individuals, either adults,

or children. To respect other people’s opinions and their way to express themselves is

connected to each person’s individual path in life and to the way one develops his own

individual action. In that sense, children are, preferably, seen as individual citizens,

municipally speaking (that is to say, as local citizens) and their rights to participation

are not dissolved into a generic category – childhood – but rather, they are built on the

real subject, the child. Including children in different worlds of life allows us to

consider that participation as something heterogeneous, either concerning the ways of

expression, or the contents which mobilise individual will and which present themselves

as a reason for claiming, proposing or resisting. This social and political dimension

requires the individual to be able to develop an influential action. Participation is a way

to exercise an influential action in a specific context. However, each one of these

individual interventions carries a generic sign of the generational category the children

belong to. It is the ability to identify that generational sign, beyond all the differences,

that allows decision and policy makers to know what their work means to a significant

percentage of their constituents – young people.

School as a space for children’s political intervention

Children’s participation in school context is not just an educational strategy or some

kind of “trend” (if we were to consider the importance of participatory ideas in the

educational movement of Escola Nova/New School, we should stress the fact it is a

century old trend). In the light of the mutual implications of the modern and democratic

project of school for everyone and the guiding lines established by the Convention on

the Rights of the Child, children’s participation in school organisation is a political and

social desideratum which corresponds to a renewed concept of childhood as a

generation made of active subjects with rights of their own (and not just passive

recipients of adults’ educational action) and a means for refreshing public school, its

goals and structural features.

In that sense, children’s decisions about aspects concerning options in school context –

about the content of educational activities, what resources to use, the time and way to

exercise it, etc. – have an obvious political dimension and stress their need to chose

between different values and options.

Though very little acknowledged by the current legislation and hardly studied (you will

find a couple of studies registered on the main data bases on education and childhood in

Portugal), children’s participation occurs in some contexts, namely schools which

promote educational practices which presume that the rights of the child should be

present during teaching work. The focus of the study conducted is precisely one of those

schools (Sarmento, Abrunhosa & Soares, 2005). The Escola do Ensino Básico de

Abação, Paraíso nº1 (from now on it shall be referred to as the School) takes part in the

Agrupamento de Escolas Agostinho da Silva, (as a matter of fact it is the

Agrupamento’s headquarter), and is located in the periphery of Guimarães, in the north

of Portugal. It includes children aged from 3 to 10 (Early childhood education up to the

4th grade). This school has been developing, for the past years, an educational project

focused on the students as learning subjects and active members of the educational

community. The nature of this pedagogical project is quite clear, at once in the

omnipresent work of the children, who cooperated on the formal shaping of the building,

denominated Área Aberta: all decorated with paintings, drawings, manual work, big

pictures and posters made by and inspired in the students themselves.

The School project is called “Educar para a Vida/Educate for Life”. “Educate for Life”

can be interpreted as an education for and with life, where school makes an impression

on the personal life of each and everyone of the people who study and work there. The

project was approved and it is regularly reviewed during the Assembleia de

Escola/School Assembly, a collective decision mechanism, according to which every

student has the right to vote. Maybe what is more relevant is the point where active and

non directive pedagogy intersect: the students’ affirmation of power. Such notion

resides in the affirmation that the students’ interest should be a priority, which

presupposes the possibility they have to express themselves and to decide accordingly,

the autonomy regarding the functioning and the subordination of the space-time

structure to its own dynamics. This power affirmation collides with the strict

institutional structure of school for the masses: class organisation (cf. Barroso, 1995;

Vincent et al., 1994). That is why it takes place within an alternative structure:

committees and study and research groups.

The course of action intentionally chosen by the school can be influenced by the social

context and, at the same time, produce a process of interpretation about those

circumstances and, thus, contribute, by acting at close range with the children, to rebuild

child-oriented early socialisation practices, namely those which result from familial

education processes.

Within a popular social context, daily educational action may play a significant role in

the affirmation of children’s citizenship, by having institutionalised the rights of the

child, in order to change some of the family-centered practices. The more this kind of

educational course of action comes closer to the cultural realities of the children, by

increasing the educational potential of their own knowledge, in order to value and

promote them, the more favourable to the rebuilding of those practices it shall be. The

daily social setting of the children who attend the School has offered them nothing but

deprivation and has showed them how cruel, uneven and fierce the world can be. In

their world of life – and, consequently, in their work at school, in their peer play and in

the childhood cultures they build and share – there is a synthesis of those learning

processes and a school experience which proposes to construct the rights of the child.

Such synthesis will only become understandable if the educational course of action is

able to recover, not only informal kinds of knowledge, rather children’s own life

experience. Otherwise, by not fulfilling its purposes, school risks becoming that “sacred

place of silence where things apart from reality are spoken” (Iturra, 1991:59).

The first aspect – the development of a participatory, and not alienated, effort – is

expressed by an ongoing investment on the participation of the students in the planning,

execution and assessment processes of the different courses of actions. Classroom

activities use vital instruments such as the annual, weekly and daily planning of

activities, which is discussed and negotiated with the students, and the classroom

meeting/assembly, the ultimate place of affirmation of the collective will and of conflict

clearance and management. The classes use a class journal/class record-book to express

their collective will. That is where the students usually write down, in multicoloured

letters, their decisions. The planning and assessment records are registered by the

students in wall maps posted all around the classroom. They use them to map down,

through agreed upon symbolism, the curricular areas to cover and the progress obtained.

This first aspect consists, mainly, of the participated definition of the subjects proposed

for the school thematic weeks and the committees’ goals.

The committees are autonomous curricular spaces. These structures consist of groups of

students elected in every classroom, two for each class, that are supported by one or two

teachers and, some of them, by teacher aids, whose goal is to organise curricular project

activities (for instance, pottery work, pedagogical farm, library, newspaper, play area,

weaving work), during school time, and following a schedule which results from the

needs of the work itself. The workshops are also managed by committees constituted

according to the same procedures.

In short, the School intends to build an alternative way of teaching within the public

school system. As far as the guidelines are concerned, it is similar to a school project

which uses active teaching-learning methods and follows an educational concept of

empowering students, who become, thus, responsible for such things as selecting

activities, working methods and managing time. The project is coherently coordinated

with a set of concepts and beliefs based on active and non-directive pedagogies and

which expresses a model of school capable of deconstructing itself, while being based

on an institutional structure, and capable of reconstructing itself, while being a social

setting for children.

But this deconstruction raises some issues, especially because it expresses a different

assessment about the nature and limitations of the power held by the students. These

issues affect its structure and the way actions and management are coordinated.

However, the ongoing symbolic emphasis on the affirmation of the rights of the child

sets the interaction patterns and works as the element of trust, so indispensable to the

school functioning. The school lives the dynamics resulting from the conflicting

confluence of the institutional pattern of public school and the projected concept of

school as a space to exercise the rights of the child.

The tasks performed at school, mainly the ones related to the committees, research

groups, or thematic weeks, but also many of the ones performed in the classroom, define

a space for educational action based on active and non-directive concepts, which

acknowledge the student’s central role in school, the need to maintain his autonomy, the

value of cooperation and team work and a kind of teaching which bets on action. This is

the end of the institutional school model, based on the notion that the classroom with

one teacher and a restricted number of students with the same functioning level plays a

nuclear part. The organization of the space of the school is also planned in a way that

encourages the autonomous, cooperative and participated construction of his own

knowledge. The consistency of teaching around a school project based on these defining

parameters, is not based on a fully planned frame of thought, but rather on the ongoing

search for a means to justify the action, which follows a creative logic: the construction

of the rights of the child. The same way, the coordination of action owes more to the

encouragement and the divulgation of experimental ways of teaching than to the strict

and collective planning of the task or to the control over whatever each teacher does in

the classroom. The students become subjects in the course of action and organizational

socialisation agents of the new teachers.

The School aims to overcome the tensions which place the public school in a

paradoxical situation. These tensions are ultimately focused on two vectors that shape

the social status of childhood: one results from seeing children as beings with their own

rights and the other one results from the institutionalised duty to educate them. They

seem to shape two different “worlds” – a world of freedom and self-regulation and a

world of compulsion and hetero-regulation, or according to Derouet (1992:120), a world

of violence and a world of love.

What a peculiar path the School is treading. A combination of hardship pertaining to all

things that are unique and the muffled joy reflected on how proud students and teachers

seem to be as they share their work with whoever crosses their way in school. The

ultimate goal: a place for justice. One of its biggest paradoxes is precisely the fact that

this goal, one of the most fascinating features of the future public school, matches an

old dream: school cannot be but the city of the rights of the child.

To conclude, we can say that the search for a citizenship culture, as grounds for a

symbolic administration based on the rights of the child in school context, is based on

two major axes:

The first one takes root in the promotion of clearly pro-child educational dynamics, that

is to say, the focus of the intervention is on the child, on his needs and rights. The bet is

on interventions fully aware of each child cultural diversity and identity. Consequently,

the school is spared the massifying and uniforming logics which promote, feed and

reproduce social inequality and selectivity. These interventions and dynamics are

supported by the suited organizational apparatus and break off with the institutionalised

structures shaped according to the secular model of school.

The second axis is rooted in a wager on paradigmatic changes relating the roles and

competencies of the child as a student. The absolute need to overcome the notion that

children are the “tabula rasa” where anyone can imprint knowledge and social values

implies the rethinking of the traditional perspectives which delegate the rights of the

child to a third party (parents, teachers or even the State), by managing it in an arbitrary

manner, granting no autonomy, nor decision skills to children. The change, then, shall

have to take a chance on the idea that the child is someone who has his own rights,

someone who exists and who possesses his own social skills, who is the main agent of

his own developing process, who has the right to a voice and to participate in the

choices regarding educational policies.

Conclusions

Whenever children are called upon to make a political intervention – or else to

participate, at the same time, in an unveiling act and to create opportunities for action,

whenever social sciences focus on children’s political participation – they reveal

political skills. Children provide grounds for their actions, the interaction is cooperation

and competition-based, the powers that be are not indifferent to their assessment of the

situation and to the adoption of strategic actions and tactics, to the introduction of

claims and resilient behaviours, to the consolidation of alliances and promotion of

negotiations, to the expression of trans-individual values and the protection of private

interests, in short, to political action.

Children are political actors, even though their political skills are primarily exercised

during peer interaction and in the common space they share away from the adults’ stare

(Rayou, 2003). However, we can say that children’s political action is exercised, either

fully or in a subtle way, in all their worlds of life.

The point is to know how children’s political action change when we switch from

reference in the analysis scale and go from seeing political action according to

immediate life contexts to a kind of action with a bigger impact on “the public sphere”

(Habermas, 19xx), or in other words, to change from micro-policies, applied to concrete

action systems, to macro-policies of community or social inclusion.

The analysis on three of the categories of children’s political action (necessarily

mentioned here briefly), namely world-sphere, regarding the social movements of

children, social local sphere, regarding the intervention on policies planned for the

municipality, and institutional sphere, through political and educational action in school

context, shows that children are able to take on political goals, to actively take part in

the decision-making process, to assess their activities and to interpret their impact on

the remaining participants in the process. Children’s political action takes place either as

an individual action, by autonomous subjects, with informed opinions and intervention

skills, or as a collective action, as individuals involved in a solidary process of

affirmation and mobilisation in favour of social transformation. The variable related to

political action does not inhibit the exercise of any political skills. This exercise

depends much more on real chances of participation than on any kind of limitations

inherent to the children’s ability to participate in the public sphere.

The analysis on children’s political action shows that it also depends on the terms of its

own performance. Its institutional and formal contexts are never indifferent to the

authors. Obviously, the actions exercised during a dictatorship or a democracy,

according to systems which whether inhibit autonomy or promote individual

intervention skills or sharing the power to decide are not similar in any way. If this

applies to adults, it does even more to children who bear the burden of not being

acknowledged the moral status of competent intervenients in the polis. The full

affirmation of children’s participatory skills depends on how adults organise their terms,

whether you are referring to school organization, local policies, or society in general. A

supported concept of active citizenship cannot be pursued if you rely just on children as

lead stars. When we think of active citizenship we mean social organization. That is the

reason why – it is worth stressing it – there is no full civil, political or social citizenship

without economical, cultural and “intimate” citizenship (Plummer, cit. In Nogueira e

Silva, 2001:96), i.e., the kind of citizenship applied to interpersonal relationships.

But children’s political action takes into consideration the childhood cultures, in other

words, a unique way to interpret, act and interact with the reality which results from

childhood’s contrasting generational nature. Children’s political participation must not

be thought as “ape-like” imitation of adult politicians’ behaviours. Children do not,

necessarily, make good parliament members, even miniaturised ones, or “little men”

leaders from political parties, or small-sized decision-makers. They are competent

political social actors, and still they are children. In fact, the more they are competent,

the more their generational status is respected. This warning is as important as the

temptation to colonise children during certain political actions. This is best expressed

through non child-like courses of action, that is to say some form of participatory

“tokenism” (Hart, 1997). The development of new ways to listen to opinions and new

decision-making processes is quite vital if you care to make children’s voice (that voice

that has never ceased to echo, even if not very loudly, in the interstitial spaces it is

allowed to exist) truly heard.

The Portuguese poet Ruy Belo once wrote: “children all the children when they’re

children/they’ll find out too late that they were and that they’ve lost it/the unconscious

science of knowing how to be/beautiful children said I like a sail boat all the

children/ever as public as the sun in fading gardens/most certainly despised by greedy

civil constructors/who inhabit our aseptic cities…”. Acknowledging children’s “public”

moral status is, most surely, the reason why we should try to create, not without their

help, less aseptic cities, where the sun may shine brighter over our gardens and our

fellow citizens are less greedy…

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