As raízes da medicalização da educação no Brasil: racismo e dominação de classe na Primeira República

Abstract

The overall objective of this dissertation is to analyze the medical-psychological roots of hegemonic pedagogical ideas in Brazil, emphasizing how the medicalization of education significantly influenced the construction of the New School Movement and the direction of the country’s educational policies. Drawing on the reflections of Maria Helena Souza Patto, we seek to understand how certain medical and psychological ideas entered the Brazilian educational project from a historical perspective. Supported by Marx’s social theory, we analyze the processes of societal medicalization and their relationship with the genesis of capital and its forms of social mediation. We conclude that the medicalization of society plays a fundamental role in the emergence of racial theories and modern racism, serving as a guise for the ideology of colonialism. By studying the reception of foreign ideas in Brazil between the end of the Monarchy and the course of the First Republic, we were able to assess the role of medicine in the formation of Brazilian social thought and how medical and psychological ideas were utilized in educational reform projects during the 1920s. Among the various figures of the period, we delve deeper into the life and some works of Afrânio Peixoto, understanding that the Bahian physician-politician was a central figure in the intersection of medical and psychological ideas with educational policies at the time. We gained a more concrete understanding of how diverse fields such as Medicine, Psychology, and Education actively participate in the mechanisms of justification and naturalization of domination processes that are reproduced in Brazilian society. Thus, we highlight that the processes of medicalization of education in Brazil relied on instruments of violence and exclusion, interconnetected with the production of racism and class domination.