This text addresses possible relationships between Freire’s ideas and the constitutional practices of democratic management as a principle of public education. It is a relevant movement that breaks with the tradition of school administration based on classical theories such as Taylorism, Fordism, and Fayolism, to become a dialogic mediation inspired by Freire’s principles.
Reflections on this relevant tendency enable us to highlight characteristics of the school as an organization that transforms itself and, therefore, can be seen as a ‘learner’. In these analyses, the theoretical-practical approach between democratic management and Freirean thought employed categories such as Weberian ideal types. Thus, dialogicity, emancipation, and participation represented constructs of analysis that identified the approach between Freire’s theory, elaborated in the middle of the 20th century, and the principles of public education, enacted by the 1988 Federal Constitution in the process of the country’s re-democratization.