O movimento Escola Sem Partido, políticas conservadoras e a educação das crianças pequenas em tempos de resistência: concepções de criança, infância e Educação Infantil

Abstract

The present doctoral thesis aims to research the conceptions of child, childhood and Early Childhood Education of the Nonpartisan school Movement and its reflections on the first stage of Basic Education. For this, we used the official website of the movement on the internet, https://www.escolasempartido.org/. As a methodological approach we carried out two analyses: the first was a descriptive analysis of what we found on the site, and the second was a critical analysis of the publications and narratives generated from the descriptors "child", "childhood" and "Early Childhood Education" entered in the search field. We highlight the construction of a bibliographic review on the theme in the CAPES Theses and Dissertations Catalog, between the years 2016 and 2020, which showed an expansion of academic discussions on the subject, but in a small amount regarding the theme and education of infants and young children. The main theoretical contribution is found in the Studies of Children and Childhood, in public policies for Early Childhood Education and other academic bibliographic productions concerning the theme. We also dialogue with Freire (2011a), Benjamin (2009a), Gramsci (1999, 2001), Chauí (2001, 2006), Marx and Engels (2007) that allow us to reflect on the impossibility of neutral discourses and on the school as a terrain of political-ideological disputes through concepts that are re-elaborated together during the research and writing of the thesis: banking education, experience, ideology, structure and superstructure, hegemony, organic and engaged intellectual. The investigation occurs in the tensions and contradictions between the conceptions present in the Nonpartisan school Movement (and resulting bills) and the (im)possibilities for children and adults before the understandings present in official documents and studies produced in the field of Education, with a focus on Early Childhood Education, and the very history of the emergence of daycare centers and insertion of Early Childhood Education as the first stage of Basic Education. The ideas of Escola Sem Partido place the child in the place of naivety and manipulability, childhood as a category marked by incompleteness and transition to adulthood, and Early Childhood Education as a stage of Basic Education preparatory to later stages with restrictions on some approaches, especially those involving gender and sexuality. This perspective is opposed to the conception of the child as a subject of rights, historical, political, and socially participatory present in academic studies in this field, as well as to the legal references that govern and/or guide the pedagogical work in Early Childhood Education institutions. It is also part of the scope of this research to reflect on the advance of conservatism in Brazil, historically and politically contextualizing the Nonpartisan school, which, despite presenting itself as non-ideological and preaching a (supposed) neutrality, is a movement of conservative and authoritarian character, ideological arm of a policy for the capital, which ends up silencing the children and restricting the teaching work. The militant and implicated character of this research stands out, since we understand it as part of a movement of resistance to the neoconservative offensive, to the authoritarian and reactionary policies that affect (also) the Education of young children, as well as its countless facets, even facing a pandemic moment.