Biopolítica e escola moderna: apontamentos para um debate

Abstract

This paper aims at contributing to the debate about the current Foucauldian studies in education in Brazil, by proposing a research agenda focused on the dyad biopolitics-schooling, especially with regard to the implementation of modern pedagogy in the country in the decades of 1920/30, which seems to reverberate in the educational present. For this purpose, we take up the main propositions of Michel Foucault's theorizing about the “statization of the biological” and the emergence of the population as a political problem, made possible by the rise of public procedures devoted to regulating population contingents as a whole without the need to arise new institutions, as it occurred in the disciplinary era. Then, we review critically some historiographical studies that have used such a framework to develop their analyzes, which seem to have been restricted to a kind of interpretation of biopolitics in the educational field as imposition, resignification or mere discipline of school populations. Hence modern school is often related to a broad ideological program dedicated to diverting citizens, and more specifically, school children from an allegedly free, egalitarian and authentic nature. In the final discussions, we present some digressions on the analytical possibilities offered by Foucault’s last courses, by means of which one could overcome the binary pair power/resistance, reaching the core of the veridiction/subjectivation processes that lead modern individuals to conceive themselves as beings in permanent development, in search of constant security and self-control towards a world full of stimuli for bodies considered as limited but completely adaptable.