A invenção dos direitos de aprendizagem e desenvolvimento nos documentos curriculares da educação infantil no Brasil

Abstract

This thesis discusses the rights to learning and development proposed in guiding documents for Early Childhood Education, supported by a theoretical and documentary perspective on the concepts of child, childhood, and curriculum. The central issue that guided this research sought to investigate the historical trajectory through which the invention of children’s rights to learning and development was shaped, as established in the guiding documents for early childhood education, within a curricular perspective of the right to education in Brazil. The methodological inspiration comes from Thomas Popkewitz’s (1997) Social Epistemology, which enables an examination of theoretical frameworks and documents, situating the ways in which knowledge is intertwined with the "social" world to produce power relations. In seeking to answer this central research question, we initially present the historical and social trajectory that led to the recognition and emergence of the notion of child and childhood (Ariès, 2014; Freitas, 2001; Kohan, 2005; Narodowski, 1993), as well as the concepts and perspectives on curriculum and curricular policies for childhood, drawing on authors such as Abramowicz and Kramer (2023); Apple (1998); Carvalho et al. (2021); Moreira and Silva (2013); Popkewitz (1994, 1997, 2001); Santos and Macedo (2021); and Silva (2021). To further understand how the collective right to education becomes a child’s individual right to learning and development – to live together, play, participate, explore, express, and know oneself – as stated in the BNCC document (Brazil, 2017) and other documents analyzed, contributing to neoliberal policies that increasingly invest in the production of the neosubject (Dardot & Laval, 2016), we examined several guiding documents for Early Childhood Education (Federal Constitution, 1988; Statute of the Child and Adolescent, 1990; Law of Guidelines and Bases, 1996; National Education Plan; RCNEI, 1998; DCNEI, 2009; BNCC, 2017). These documents confirmed our initial hypothesis that these individual rights had already been taking shape prior to the BNCC (Brazil, 2017), and that they can be– and are – taken up by different proposals aiming either to democratize or standardize the subject. Our thesis, consolidated at the end of this study, confirms the hypothesis raised at the beginning of the research, that the rights to learning and development were consolidated long before the BNCC document (2017), marking a historical trajectory that began with the Federal Constitution of 1988 and gained greater visibility after the 1996 LDB, even if they were not always presented as rights, or even cited with greater emphasis in some documents, as we observed in those whose bias is to reference and subsidize the construction of the early childhood education curriculum, than in others, of a more legislative nature. However, all six rights appeared in some of the documents, still resembling each other in their conceptual approach.