This article discusses the public, private and communitarian in Brazilian education, commenting on the issues of abandoning the principles of democracy of equality and of inscribing education in the realm of philanthropy as part of the process of the modification/reduction of state intervention in social policy, legitimized by the metamorphosis of the concepts that can be verified in the educational ambit and combined with the weakening of the struggle for public education and the strengthening of the so called "third sector" of society.