Democratização da educação superior e juventude: reflexões sobre o cursinho popular Darcy Ribeiro da Rede Emancipa

Abstract

This dissertation, in multipaper format, combines three articles resulting from researches on the Darcy Ribeiro Popular Course of the Emancipa Network, in the city of Montes Claros, located in the north of Minas Gerais. The general objective of this study is to analyze the actions of the Course as an instrument of democratization of access to Higher Education for the youth from the north of Minas Gerais, and perhaps from other regions and states of the country. Such objective is consolidated once the objectives in each article were achieved. The general objective of each article is in consonance with the specific objectives of the dissertation, which gave rise to the three articles, entitled in this order: “Democratization and Public Policies of Higher Education”; “The Emancipa Network: protagonists of their histories” and “Democratization and Darcy Ribeiro Popular Course of Emancipa Network: under a view of the Youth”. The study of qualitative, documentary and field research was theoretically and methodologically based on the dialectical historical Materialism due to its critical, totalitarian, contradictory and hegemonic nature. The data collection instruments used were 80 student registration forms of the year 2021, which declared enrollment in CadÚnico, a program of the Federal Government, and semi-structured interviews that took place online through the Google Meet platform. The locus of the research is the Darcy Ribeiro Popular Course of the Emancipa Network, in the city of Montes Claros-MG. The first article showed results that Education, in its socio-historical context, is an instrument of protagonism of the subjects with power of transformation, which contributes to personal change, from the exchange of knowledge. This tends to reverberate in the reality in which they are inserted, as well as in their new life cycles. In the second article, the results indicate that the pandemic period of COVID-19 accentuated the students’ difficulties in preparing for the exams, since the suspension of classroom activities required physical inputs, such as computers and internet installation. In this analysis we showed that, despite the impasses, young people seek, besides passing the university entrance exam, to help build a social and political movement. In the third article, we found that the educational practices of the Darcy Ribeiro Popular Course summarize and reinforce the thought of Paulo Freire’s thought of popular and liberating education, becoming an important instrument of struggle and resistance for the democratization of Higher Education. It is urgent and necessary that all the principles of emancipatory education proposed by Freire are in force in these spaces, not limited just to a hope without action. Thus, based on the results and the analysis of the articles, we conclude that this study presents possibilities for further studies and research.