The dissertation concerns the pedagogical discursive practices that, since the end of the last military dictatorship in Argentina, have generated principles about who is the "responsible citizen" and what constitutes democratic conduct. The focusing is on national education laws and congressional debates, textbooks, and public memorial spaces produced since the twentieth anniversary of the coup in 1996. The study draws on foucaultian analysis to make visible the ways in which subjectivities are linked to collective belonging in terms of democratic narratives of the nation. The dissertation explores the limits of the pedagogical common sense that aims at remaking the citizen and thereby preventing the horror of the past from ever happening again. The grid of discursive practices about the subject of democracy is examined as a certain memory work and the construction of a historical consciousness are deployed as technologies in governing the self and the population. The principles generated embody a particular foundational view of democracy that continuously reinscribes a partition that determines who is to participate and how that participation is to take place in ways that negate the very democracy that these efforts are attempting to achieve. The study pushes against the ways in which modern schooling has been conceptualized and the modern subject historically fabricated as an agent of change in pedagogy. The afterword explores an alternative, post-foundational approach about democratic education in order to open up new possibilities through engaging in a history of the pedagogical present. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]