Philosophical notes: Ângelo Ricardo de Souza.

Below is a list of the things I learned by reading the following works by Ângelo Ricardo de Souza: exploring and building a concept of democratic school management, management and evaluation of school education and school management profile in Brazil.

1. A society is all the more democratic the more available are the means of social ascension to all social classes.
2. The excess of rules allows democracy to be controlled, rather than free, which ends up acting against the democratic ideal.
3. Student evaluation and school evaluation are complementary.
4. The evaluation is diagnostic, and alone does not solve the problem of the school that fails in its goal (teaching).
5. Before starting your studies, think of a study plan.
6. Instead of developing educational policies focused on certain social groups, it would be better and more consistent with the ideal of universal education to develop educational policies with national coverage.
7. Although failure or approval are consequences of a test, these things are not the main objective of evaluative practice, whose purpose is to quantify the student’s learning, so that we can know if teachers are doing their job correctly.
8. The seemingly technical indication of someone for the position of school principal may well be a political indication disguised as a technical indication.
9. The quality of men is more important than the form of government.
10. The principal’s task is to ensure the conditions under which the teacher can practice teaching.
11. Running a school whose environment (physical and social) is unknown will result in harmful administration to the school.
12. School maladministration is one of the factors that cause problems at school, but it is not the only one, so one should not think that all the problems of the school are solved with changes in the way it is managed.
13. Male directors have more community support than support from superiors.
14. Men need to have a community spirit, sharing responsibility and functions, rather than concentrating power and decisions in the hands of one of them.
15. Men are a minority among teachers and principals, positions mostly held by women.
16. Male teachers need to think more about their own qualifications, because women teachers, in general, have more qualifications.
17. When democracy comes to represent group interests, rather than representing individual voters, the foundations of fascism are laid out, since the suppression of the individual in a group is a characteristic of fascism.
18. When a principal becomes an influential leader, he can rival the mayor in political influence.
19. It would be better if the principal was chosen by majority vote at the school.
20. All formal institutions have informal groups in them, which can operate in favor of or against the formal organization (conspiring against the administrator or exercising illicit forms of power).
21. A study conducted in the population of another country, with foreign empirical foundations, will generate conclusions that may be useless in Brazil, for these foreign empirical foundations have different characteristics from the Brazilian empirical foundations that could be used in that study.
22. A diagnostic evaluation points to problems, but alone does not solve them.
23. You can’t run a school like you would run a hospital, prison, or company.