JUSTIÇA NA EDUCAÇÃO E MEDICALIZAÇÃO DA INFÂNCIA

https://doi.org/10.29327/211653.6.6-7

Abstract

The studies that we have conducted at the Pierre Bourdieu Laboratory of Sociological Studies (LAPSB/UFSC) about justice in education, helped to develop the perspective we used to analyze the growing tendency to pathologize school age children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder. As we went deeper into the studies we found that behaviors considered to be deviant by educational professionals have been related to difficulties in school learning and triggered processes that tend to pathologize many children. This finding led schools to be considered one of the agencies that legitimate social differences by individualizing and personifying obstacles to school learning in students. This creates a standard of behavior considered to be normal and simultaneously establishes a standard for abnormality. Many schools particularize different expressions of children as consequences of biopsychic problems. They thus focus their diagnosis of the children on other contexts and do not need to reformulate their own procedures. By exchanging pedagogical possibilities for the medicalization of children, schools help to construct an identity of students as pathologized. They come to be understood as victims of fate, for whom schools characterize the limits of their learning and not its potential. Our sociological perspective in the analysis of this situation aims to reveal the production of biopsychic pathologies that also serve to promote injustices in the field of education.