Biopoder e normalização da infância: apontamentos sobre a instrumentalização do lúdico

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss how the relationship between biopower, education and children's production of subjectivity clues point the instrumentalization of play activity in early childhood education. To that end, establishing a dialogue with theoretical anthropological and social psychological aspects dealing with the joke, but mainly with Foucault and the authors make reference to complicate matters relating to children. At first, the text discusses biopower in Foucault's perspective, emphasizing its relation to historical and social construction of childhood and its relationship with the field of education. Already in a second time, the text raises conceptual questions about the play activity and their tensions within the school, from social anthropological reflections by Brougère Gilles and considerations arising from the field of psychology, especially Lev Seminiovitch Vygotsky, Daniil Elkonin and Henry Wallon. Then it was discussed devices standardization of childhood from the appropriation of the play activity as an educational tool in the school context. The essay concludes that such appropriation is intimately related to the invention and institutionalization of childhood in Modernity and the improvement of new modalities of power, such as discipline and biopolitics, which relate, in a simultaneous and complementary, in individuals and populations, respectively.