Lustosa Lisboa Dutra

This text is the result of a study carried out during the Master’s programme in Education, completed in 2014. The intention was to contribute to an understanding of today’s university in the context of political, social and economic changes at national and global level. As a starting point, the reflection turns to the meaning of human formation idealised by the Greek philosophers Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The discussion then centres on the medieval period, when the university was born and became an educational institution. In it there is questioning, problematisation, the search for the new, the unseen, it creates, recreates, invents, reinvents, in short, there is the contemplation of knowledge. In the end, training at today’s university is called into question, especially since the 1990s, with the reform of the state. The university has gone from being an institution to a social organisation and, as such, it has left dormant what it was really meant to do - training.