SOME PERSPECTIVES ON THE MEDICAL MATRICES OF BRAZILIAN EDUCATION

Abstract

The history of Brazilian education is deeply influenced by medical knowledge, especially hygienist and eugenicist, which intervened in the school space from the 19th century onward. These practices consolidated the school as a place of discipline, normalization, and control. The methodology used was based on a critical bibliographic review of authors who discuss the intersections between education, medicine, and psychiatry, articulated with the genealogical inspiration of Michel Foucault. From this approach, we sought to understand how practices of medical knowledge-power were instituted in schools. The general objective is to analyze how medical-hygienist discourses can be updated in contemporary educational practices, especially through discourses of inclusion that maintain mechanisms of normativity and medicalization of students. The specific objectives are: a) to investigate the historical constitution of the school as a space for medical intervention; b) to understand, from a Foucauldian perspective, how the processes of normativity and disciplining of bodies are maintained in contemporary education; c) to problematize the permanence of normativity as an institutional response to behaviors considered deviant in the school environment. It is concluded that Brazilian schools remain permeated by a medical rationality that, rather than overcoming exclusionary processes, reinscribes them into new practices. Medicalization, therefore, presents itself as a historical continuation of normative strategies.