Biopolítica, medicalização e pandemia da Covid-19: saberes, discursos e poderes sobre as infâncias na educação brasileira nos séculos 20 e 21

Abstract

This thesis has as its object of study the relations of knowledge and power over childhood through bio-necropolitics at the beginning of the 20th and 21st centuries. Escola Nova, hygienism by Arthur Ramos, Biosafety Protocols and a case study, as we understand that these provide evidence that goes beyond mere theories or preventive actions applied to education. Bearing in mind that Arthur Ramos was involved in the hygienist movement and was close to the new school Anísio Teixeira when he was invited to work at the Orthophrenia and Mental Hygiene Service (SOHM). According to Cardoso (2017) and Martins (2014), there were traces of educational reform and hygiene in Alagoas. We will be based on studies by Santos (2018) that involve Arthur Ramos' connection to the Escola Nova curriculum in Alagoas lands. However, there are no studies on Arthur Ramos' hygiene as a biopolitical strategy in school education, as well as its repercussions over time, or a new guise in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, establishing a neohygienism. We had as main objective: to treat the educational proposal as a means of production of subjectivities, in particular, the New School, characterizing an infantile governmentality in the analyzed knowledge and discourses; discuss medical intervention in the educational field, as a biopolitical strategy, with regard to the concept and treatment given to childhood, above all, the performance of the Alagoan doctor Arthur Ramos at Escola Nova and analyze the speeches through control mechanisms that permeate power and its effects; analyze discipline and its operating mechanisms in conduct control processes; and finally, to investigate the practices of biopower in the constitution of a neoliberal governmentality of childhood, especially in Alagoas, in the 20th century (in the years 1930-1940) and the pandemic context of the 21st century (in the years 2020-2021). Because, probably, throughout the history of education, a neoliberal governmentality of childhood was constituted, articulated with medical-school knowledge, and which has been reconfigured in official discourses on education in times of pandemic (Covid-19). Thus, the research object involves the eugenic and hygienist educational practices instituted by the State, in the movement of (bio)necropolitics. Thus, we have as a problem: “How has biopolitics been translated into school education in times of the Covid-19 pandemic and what are its relations with 20th-century hygiene?”. In order to answer the research problem, we adopted as a methodology the bibliographical, documentary and case study research with a qualitative approach. We carried out investigations through readings of books, articles, dissertations and theses in digital and printed format about how school education was constituted, specifically in the 20th century and in the period of the pandemic (21st). Thus, investigating the performance of biopolitics and medicalization in the History of Education permeated by Hygienism and the pandemic, it became necessary to understand the vision of man and society that permeates child and teacher training at the time and its repercussions today. Historical sources were used, such as educational decrees (1925-1930), Revista de Ensino (1930), Jornal de Alagoas (1939), Craveiro Costa (1930, 1931), works such as The Child Problem and Saúde do Espírito: Arthur Ramos (1939). For the discussion, we rely on Michel Foucault (1985, 1994, 1996, 1999, 2002), among some works are: Archeology of Knowledge (1987), Microphysics of Power (1985), Order of Discourse (1996), In Defense of Society (2010). in the categories Abnormals (2001), The Birth of the Clinic (1994), Birth of Biopolitics (2008), In Defense of Society (1996). We had as analysis category: biopolitics, power relations, medicalization and governmentality. In the field of historiography, the perspective of the Escola dos Analles is used, above all, the New Cultural History, because it understands that it is the historian's function to also research and recover stories and characters considered invisible; thus, there is not a single History, but stories that are silenced and denied. It appears that (bio)necropolitics translated into control of the body and life of the population in a pandemic context and generated policies to exclude students from the public network, constituting the continuation of the hygienist policy in the context of the 21st century.