ABSTRACT:
This work aims at discussing the possibilities present in the Democratic Management of Public Education, with emphasis on the state of Ceará, state that has its administrative structure marked by the neopatrimonialist planning, whose principles are present in the public management, establishing a paradox to the “modernization” project of New Public Management. In the search for answers to the questions researched, the study is based, as a theory of knowledge, on dialectical historical materialism and the classics of national political science about the Brazilian State. It concludes that democratic management is established in the field of confrontation, in the struggle for hegemony, in the space of political dispute and, in the context of Ceará, it does not happen in the full sense, as social achievements, mainly because they are not reached spontaneously, they are a product of the tensions of the historical process, in collective construction, always immersed in the concrete reality of life. This participatory process operates in overcoming old habits of centralizing management or the conceptions of democracy as a legal principle only.
Keywords:
Democratic management; Neopatrimonialism; New public management