Medicalização da Educação Escolar: entre discursos e narrativas

Abstract

This research sought to answer the different paths of diagnostic construction for public school children who emerge from schooling difficulties. The main objective was to analyze, from a discursive perspective, the path of diagnostic construction of children in Public Elementary School, based on difficulties presented in the schooling process. We seek to reference ourselves from a critical perspective, based on different theoretical biases, taking the medicalization of childhood in school education as the object of this study. We also establish the linguistic distinction of the term medicalization, which is often confused with medication. Based on the contributions of French Discourse Analysis to the data analysis from this qualitative research, we seek a better understanding of how medicalizing discourses, gain strength and become euphemistic in the school space. We work with a dimension of ethos and pathos, as elements of rhetoric, for our discursive analysis perspective. We start from the assumption that, based on a collective ethos, which serves a medicalizing proposal in times of a medicalized and mediatized society, the school corroborates with certain pathemic effects on the teaching staff and children's families as a response and as a possibility of feedback to a neoliberal project of medicalization of life in all its instances. The research conducted generated an introduction essay, where we sought to present the definition of medicalization from a critical perspective, seeking contributions from authors with different theoretical affiliations, which will allow us to read about our object of study and also generated two articles: one that analyzes the discursive circulation about medicalization in virtual space, specifically on the social network Instagram®, and another that presents the analysis carried out through the Therapeutic Itinerary (TI) method, through Narrative Interviews (NE). As results achieved, we understand that this work can demonstrate, based on the samples analyzed, that there is a path to diagnostic construction for children with Attention Deficit Hiperactivity Disorder (ADHD) that necessarily passes through school and that has its first hypotheses raised in preschool and kindergarten. Following this diagnosis, children receive medication called methylphenidate which controls their bodies, but does not contribute to a significant improvement in children's learning and pedagogical development. We seek to understand the social and historical dimensions involved in the process of Medicalization of Society, which also implies the Medicalization of Education. We understand, as evidenced, that teacher training processes are linked to a neoliberal context of production, where constitutive dialogism is established. Thus, the figure of the teacher in our sample does not question the medicalizing discourses that enter the school space from a collective ethos, which in turn, already has its authority discourse demarcated and accepted in our society. Schools, as devices for the formation of subjectivities, have reproduced and perpetuated, since the times of the hygienist period, medicalizing discourses that align with biomedical discourses. It was also possible to realize that our research also opens up possibilities for medium and long-term investigations to better understand the consequences of medication use by these children, or even to investigate the possibilities of effective pedagogical monitoring to overcome the difficulties they present.