"O Brasil tem um enorme passado pela frente": uma arqueogenealogia do ataque/defesa à educação no Brasil contemporâneo (2018-2020)

Abstract

This work, in its interlocution with the field of Foucauldian studies, sought to investigate the characteristics related to the attack and defense of (public) education in contemporary Brazil. Using archeology and genealogy as conceptual tools and methodological theoretical support, in their coupling in the form of archeogenealogy, the research directed attention to the discursive and non-discursive practices around the attack and defense of education, also paying attention to an analysis of the relations of power involved in these practices. Thus, in the time frame of the years 2018 to 2020, publications of the websites of three student organizations were mapped, namely: the Brazilian Union of Secondary Students - UBES, the National Union of Students - UNE and the Brazilian Association of Postgraduate Students. Graduates – ANPG, and, to a lesser extent, journalistic articles related to the field of education and publications on websites of other civil society entities linked to political movements in defense of education were included. These actors - primarily from the student movement - worked as means by which it was possible to map the heterogeneous and plural set of characteristic of movements in defense of education and to analyze how they have responded and still respond to the alleged attacks, agglutinating agendas of the political struggle that are not directly linked to the elements of formal education, such as the defense of democracy, of the constitution, of health, among others. In this way, a multiplicity was perceived surrounding the forms of attack and defense of education, emphasizing that these forms are engendered within a neoliberal rationality, whether corroborating with it, making its operation viable, or in an attempt to limit and resist its underlying logics. This field was still read through three axes: an economic axis, related to questions about the financial resources allocated and/or withdrawn from the education portfolio, in terms of the Union's budget; a political-democratic axis, in attention to attacks on public services and goods, and restrictions on political and social rights, in opposition to the defense of the rights of minority groups and the assertion of differences and diversity; and a moral axis, made possible by a “customs agenda”, crossed, many times, by a religious fundamentalism, which took schools, universities and teachers as supposed propagators of the destruction of conservative values and consequently – in the view of the defenders of these values -, of Society. Contrapositions to the forms of attack, in turn, were constructed, with the defense of an education that would be (or should be) democratic, with the defense of education as a right and the investment in education, as well as the freedom of professorship and university autonomy , also based on a conception of plural education that does not (or should not) undermine the emergence of dissent. These elements were identified in the statements of demonstrations in defense of education, in clashes related to the Escola Sem Partido, in opposition to the Reform of Medical Education and the National Common Curricular Base - BNCC, in the refusal of the process of militarization of schools, in the dissemination of fundraising projects with an emphasis on the private sector at universities and federal institutes, such as Future-se (future yourself), as well as appointments (or interventions) for the leaders of these spaces. Finally, the research concluded with a signal for some risks in positioning certain forms of defense of education, given the ease with which they can be converted into attacks on it, establishing paths for the intensification of the process of privatization of life and subjectivities, further naturalizing the logic underlying neoliberal rationality.