As políticas públicas de educação enquanto campo multidisciplinar

Abstract

With this research, we contribute to the epistemological production in the multidisciplinary field of public education policies. The general objective was to “analyze knowledge in this area from the perspective of studies on educational policies”; this materialized in the study of a book by Janete Maria Lins de Azevedo (1997) and in a book chapter by the scholar Stephen J. Ball (2011). We added the critical examination of three articles published in specialized journals. Such research sources were fundamental due to the theoretical-methodological approach that the authors adopted in their research. Hence, it is important to analyze the theoretical / epistemic currents that permeate the scientific paths of the research object drawn here. Our guiding problem is: how have public education policies been approached in scientific productions in Brazil since the 1990s? Theoretical currents were analyzed based on the production of public education policies in the context of the reform of the neoliberal Brazilian State, with this, we adopted the method of materialism-historical-dialectic created by Marx (1999; 1998). We deepened, through the method, the studies about public education policies, namely: Tello (2012; 2019); Ball and Mainardes (2011); Tello and Almeida (2013); Diogenes (2014) and Mainardes (2017). After conducting the research, we concluded that: (1) public education policies are inserted in a historical context determined by asymmetric power relations; (2) social inequality and social conflicts generated by the concentration of income need to be considered in research carried out on the area; (3) the epistemic bases of educational policies are complex and transdisciplinary, which makes this area a multidisciplinary field; and, (4) the production of contemporary knowledge about educational policies, in the context of neoliberalism, has dominated the relationship between State and Academy, reducing state investment in the field of financing for scientific research.