Ocupando os latifúndios do saber: subsídios para o ensino da ciência na perspectiva politécnica da educação

Abstract

The purpose of the present dissertation is to ponder over the pedagogical-philosophical principles of the act of teaching science in the middle stage of school education. Considering that both the educational and the scientific exercises are social exercises that interpose the production process, and that, therefore, one cannot think about them without a method that integrates them dialectically taking in consideration variables that are given in the political economy field, I attempted to investigate here which is today the statute reserved to science in the set of values introduced by the neoliberal political economy and the effects of this shift over what is prescribed for the scientific education in the Brazilian high school since the educational reform. This dissertation highlights the connections that emerged between the universalization process of the merchandise-appearance and the changes introduced in the system of knowledge production, which becomes gradually more shaped by the goals and prescriptions of the capital. Using as reference the historical-dialectical materialism, the object of this dissertation was chosen in a way to reflect the creation process of science production in two different ways: that of macro-politics, since the 1990s hegemonically presided by the institutions associated with the capital, and that of the epistemological relation that lies underneath the contemporary scientific exercise, emphasizing the correlation between these processes and their causal nexus. To deal with these relations, I conducted a philosophical and historical investigation that had as main purpose to demonstrate how the concept of nature invented by the first scientists of the 17th century future reference of the conception of natural science as it is applied to the school program -, based in a rigid distinction between fact judgments and value judgments, owns its content to a process that is mainly economical and social. Through this critic I tried to establish the bonds between the political economy, the institutional bias of science and the universe of epistemology. I concluded that there is a necessary relationship between the new institutional register of knowledge production, guaranteed by a regulatory statute consonant with the needs of neoliberalism, and the new epistemological statute, marked by an emphasis in the given concepts of the naïve scientific realism. This relationship projects itself over the science teaching in the shape of an intensification of its technical substance, among which two deserve to be highlighted: 1) the concept of nature, applied to the science teaching as an a-historical abstraction; 2) the myth of the scientific unicity, that is, the belief that there only is one science: the one that will formulate it, in a language that is unique and inequivocal, the truth of the reality. To finish this dissertation, I mentioned two educational programs that, in my point of view, progress toward new ways of teaching science as they reflect the experience of a group of teachers and students with the principles of the polytechnical education: the Instituto de Educação Josué de Castro (IEJC/ITERRA) and the Escola Politécnica de Saúde Joaquim Venâncio (EPSJV/Fiocruz).