This article re-reads the debate occurred in the 80's regarding the relation among the educator's political engagement and his technical competence. It points out that the most emancipated ideas (as those divulged in Antonio Gramsci's texts) took the Brazilian pedagogical ideas into its dimension of political engagement, contributing inclusive, to electoral victory of the Laborer's Part. However, if at that time a certain "gramscian trendy" movement was reference and synonym to the most emancipated and free ideas; today considering the complex and multifaceted political reality it is necessary to deepen the reading of this author's ideas. A diffuse ideology of the "left wing" is no more a sufficient reference to the political engagement. For this reason this article tries to understand the new form of political engagement that the educator and the intellectual in general need to practice, saying for example that it is necessary to redeem the value of the doubt as a method; to understand the process of maturation of the democratic culture; to think again on the real process of "uninterested" politic and reaffirm that all pedagogical act in itself has already an implicit ethic political dimension, questioning thus, the bureaucratic linking with the parties.
Memory and education; Politic and education; Technical competence and political engagement; Present conjuncture