Práticas medicalizantes e patologizantes em educação: as invenções das doenças-do-não-aprender e das doenças-do-não-se-comportar

Abstract

This study investigated the relationships between school failure and the medicalization of behavior and child learning that deviate from the norm. For this, we carried out the analysis of speeches produced by teaching professionals who work in the early years of elementary school (1st to 5th grade). As a result of these research movements, we seek to support the thesis that, in the field of Education, a political-economic movement has been built, orchestrated by sectors of society that concentrate power over the Production of Knowledge and over the Economy. These sectors have shown a strong commitment to the invention of diseases-of-not-learning and diseases-of-not-behaving. One of the indicators of such commitment is the advent of the fifth Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - DSM-5 and its developments in society and, specifically, in Education. The research problem that mobilized this investigation was the following: “what are the teaching conceptions, which emerge from the discourses of teaching professionals in the early years of elementary school (1st to 5th grade), about school failure and its consequences? relations with the phenomenon of medicalization of children with behaviors and learning that deviate from the norm? The general objective of this study was to investigate the conceptions of teachers in the early years of Elementary School (1st to 5th grade), from the municipal public network of Maceió, about the possible relationships between school failure and the medicalization of invented diseases in the context of learning. and child behavior. Specifically, it aimed to: understand the relationship between school failure and the medicalization of children's learning and behavior based on a theoretical-bibliographical study; map, together with the municipal secretariat of Education of Maceió, the schools that presented the lowest results in 2019, according to the Basic Education Development Index (IDEB); and to analyze the conceptions of those who work in teaching in classes from the 1st to the 5th year of Elementary School, in schools with the lowest results in 2019, in IDEB. From the point of view methodological, it is a study of a qualitative nature, of the exploratory type, in which we sought to carry out a semistructured interview and a focus group with these subjects in order to capture possible answers to the research problem, as well as to assemble elements that, in order to in addition to the scientific evidence gathered in the literature review, they contribute to support the thesis presented here. To this end, we also analyzed the temporal relationship between the publication of the DSM-5 in May 2013 and the flow of enrollments recorded in the school census over the last twenty years. Data from the school census (2002-2022) point to a huge increase in children enrolled with a diagnosis in school systems. In periods, this increase index reached 8,322% after the publication of the manual.