The present text constitutes a summary of a talk given by the author at the III Conferência Brasileira de Educação (Niterói, October 1984). It is here claimed that there is a need to discuss the roots of the idea of rights of the individual and of its link, in Locke's founding thought, with property and, moreover, with the freedom and autonomy of the human person. Furthermore, a discussion is made of the liberal-rationalist assumption of the optimum allocation of social resources through the clash and combination of private interests. A twofold crisis of our times: crisis of the view of a self-regulated Laplacean universe (and its science: the mechanical or substancial determinism) and the crisis of the belief in the optimum allocation via market. The idea of the intervention of the State in the economy does not mean a destruction of private property nor of the value law and of profit. It only attests to its survival and seeks to ensure its implementation. Can't the idea of education be analogously thought of as a social right guaranteed and allocated by the State; as an investment in "human capital"? What is the meaning of the expression "educational policy"?
Ideology; education; private property; organization of knowledge; human capital; divison of labour