We present in this article the results of a research entitled Human rights, justice and violence: perceptions about the fair school (Direitos humanos, justiça e violência: percepções sobre a escola justa). The point of departure for the study was the observation of the impasse and circularity of the debate on violence, on the production of inequalities and on the disrespect of differences in daily school life. How can we face these conflicts in an indirect manner, dealing in a different way with demands for a fairer school, and thinking about practices that could help us to occupy a different place? In the research, we carried out a systematization of the theoretical debate on justice/injustice and a survey about the academic debate on the issue, both with their focus on the productions surrounding the school, in addition to two empirical studies. In the present text, that reflects necessarily a selection of results from a wider study, we describe perceptions about what is fair/unfair collected from students of the Pedagogy course of the Universidade de São Paulo, as well as from secondary education pupils, teachers and managers from a public school in São Paulo. These results were obtained from the analysis of the answers to a question that required describing a fair or unfair situation in the world and of a fair or unfair situation at school. We found a strong emphasis on the perception of injustice, both in the world and at school, corroborating the theoretical argument that what is positive is the perception of injustice. These perceptions are presented based on categories constructed in this study, and the article concludes with a brief description of proposals about what would constitute a fair school.
Justice; Human rights; Violence; School; Equality; Difference
