O CONHECIMENTO NA EDUCAÇÃO ESCOLAR: UMA REFLEXÃO EMANCIPADORA

Abstract

In this thesis, we seek to analyze school education in its contradictory aspects in the face of contemporary social totality and to elucidate its humanly emancipatory dimension. Based on Marx's research method, we undertook four theoretical efforts to achieve our specific objectives: a historical-ontological analysis, to elucidate the historical and social origins of school education, thereby understanding its genesis and social function; an immanent bibliographic review, to grasp and detail the contributions of Historical-Critical Pedagogy (HCP) to the understanding of educational work, the importance of classical knowledge in human formation, and the specificity of school education; an immanent reading to unveil the essence of Marx's classic (2010) and to conceptualize political and human emancipation; and a theoretical-historical-critical synthesis, to demonstrate through historical and scientific analysis the contradictions of school education in the current capitalist society, highlighting its importance from the perspective of integrity and the defense of the human species. The analyses show that human emancipation is not limited to the educational realm, as from a Marxist perspective, it is related to human beings having real opportunities to fully develop, which implies a form of society beyond capital, without any form of exploitation. Political emancipation is a social progress that emerged with capitalism, whose foundation is liberty, equality, private property, and security, citizens' rights. Among the achievements for society with political emancipation is included school education as a means of offering opportunities for learning and development to human beings. However, in the field of contradictions, schools face challenges that divert them from their specificity, among them the pedagogies of learning to learn (Duarte, 2004). Considering the concepts of political and human emancipation, and the emphasis on scientific and materialist investigation for understanding social phenomena, we argue that school education, understood as a complex founded on the category of labor, mediates with human emancipation by performing its specificity, which is to provide the necessary means for access to and appropriation of scientific, artistic, and philosophical content, in a critical and Marxist orientation. Having access to these contents is a right of all citizens, and an essential path of a broad process involving educational, political, and social aspects. The key element of this mediation is the teaching of scientific, artistic, and philosophical knowledge transposed into school content, through systematic and intentional educational work, which acts directly on the formation of students, interfering with the development of higher psychic functions, elevating subjectivity, conditioning the formation and transformation of consciousness, and the conception of the world. It is, therefore, a thesis that reinforces the defense of PHC.We understand that in school education, the struggle for the transformation of society and for human emancipation begins with the valorization of the process of transmission and assimilation of classical knowledge.