Medi(ca)r para universalizar: o discurso médico-psicológico e a medicalização na educação

Abstract

Medicalization refers to the interference of medicine in the social context, producing medical and biological interpretations of human issues that would originally be of another order. In this sense, we come across situations, typical of the educational field, being moved to the medical field, leading to the medicalization of children and school failure. When looking at the origin of the entrance of medical discourse in education, we observethat it coincides with the beginning of a proposal of educational universalization. Thus, as education began to establish itself as a social rightaimed at popularization, it was faced with a paradox:at the same time as education sought to extend to all citizens, the challenge of dealing with the diversity was introduced. It is the paradox between equality and difference that begins to occupy education. It is in this context that medicine and the nascent psychology, originated in the medical environment, have become present in the educational scenario and, with their methods of classification and testing, served to order and homogenize the differences that began to enter the schools. Faced with this, a question arises: if the medical-psychological discourse was introduced in education to answer to equality/difference paradox at the beginning of the universalizing process, can we say that the medicalization in education would be one of the answers, in the present, to this same paradox? It is only in recent decades that universalization has been consolidated and ratified. And just at the moment when it is consolidated, the presence of medicalpsychiatric discourse in education is intensified, leading to the medicalization of children and educational practice. All this leads us to question the possible relationship between medicalization in education and the current universalization process, considering that we have the interpolation between the discourse of diversity and inclusion – present in the current universalization proposal – and the medicalization, with its exclusion mechanisms. What does make such antagonistic logics coexist? Based on what psychoanalysis brings about the language and the symbolic structure that surrounds us, we seek to discuss how medicalization has masked the tensions present in the ratification of this paradox in the educational environment. This thesisis the result of a bibliographical research. However, it arose out of the concernsin work experiences, in the clinic with children and in the interlocution with the educational field.