Educação política e educação escolar: análise do Projeto Cidades Educadoras

Abstract

This study investigates the educating cities project of the International Association of Educating Cities (IAEC) and the resulting impacts on Brazilian scientific production, aiming at postgraduate programs. The guiding research questions were as follows: which conceptions underlie the educating cities project? Which conception of school education is found in the educating cities project? How was the educating cities project approached in Brazilian scientific production? The main objective is to analyze the IAEC educating cities project, seeking to reveal its political-ideological principles, the guidelines for basic education and the appropriation of its statements in Brazilian scientific production. This is a documentary research, including the survey, selection and analysis of primary and secondary sources concerning the object. The epistemological basis for the research is historical-dialectical materialism. Considering the object specificity and the rich and significant corpus of documentary materials, the research presents three content categories described from Marxist theory focusing on historical-critical pedagogy. These categories are: (i) conception of human being; (ii) school knowledge and education; (iii) purpose of school education and educational work. The starting point was to identify the materiality of the educating cities project as a historical construction inserted into a concrete, complex and contradictory social totality. It was therefore necessary to examine IAEC as well as its political-ideological connections. The concept of ideology being related to education provided the conceptual framework for the development of this research, highlighting the fact that the association's project is aligned with UNESCO, particularly the Jacques Delors Report. From the analysis undertaken here, the study concluded that IAEC is a relevant private mechanism of hegemony devoted to political education so as to secure social cohesion in capitalism. The educating cities project establishes the subordination of school education to the requirements of political education by estimating citizenship as it is proposed by the Third Way neoliberalism. It implies the overvaluation of knowledge which arises from students' immediate experience at the expense of systematized knowledge and the social function of school. The study also revealed that, based on the range of dissertations and theses analyzed, an uncritical and idealistic reading of the IAEC project is prevalent which may lead to a nationwide academic legitimacy of the project. Thus this study concluded that the background of the educating cities project does not contribute to public school education improvement efforts.