Banca de DEFESA: Samuel Cesar Machado

EUGENICS AND HYGIENISM IN SCIENCE EDUCATION

Eugenics, Hygienism, Science Education, Science Teaching.

This work focuses on the study of the intertwining of eugenic and hygienic ideas with Brazilian education. I highlight in this text that from my teaching practice emerged questions about how some practices arose and still persist in everyday school life. Perceiving the connections between these ideologies and the formation of education, especially Brazilian public schools, I sought to research, analyze, and understand more about the topic, leading me to the following question: do eugenic and hygienic ideals still influence current educational dynamics? This question led me to two other inquiries that structure this research: Did the Brazilian social structure support and continue to support the entry of scientific theories like these into various fields of knowledge? To what extent did eugenic and hygienic ideology relate to and still relate to Brazilian education? In order to investigate these questions, we conducted bibliographic research of authors who address the topic, such as Antunes (2012), Bonfim (2017), Faggion and Boarini (2018), Gebrim (2002), Goés (2015), Mansanera and Silva (2000), Stepan (2005), and Souza (2016). Seeking to answer the emerging questions, we opted for the theoretical-philosophical and methodological framework of Marxist literature, using the methodological approach of Historical Dialectical Materialism. We relied on categories such as State, Ideology, class struggle, and contradiction to analyze and discuss the relationships between these ideologies and Brazilian education. We elucidated the intrinsic relationships between the diffusion of eugenic and hygienic ideologies and the spread of liberal ideas in Brazil, emphasizing that these ideologies originated in the materiality of Brazilian social fabric in the early 20th century and that the Brazilian state acted in favor of eugenics and hygiene, seeking to mitigate existing contradictions at the time. We also showed how the educational approach based on eugenics and mental hygiene provided the basis for parts of the school system structures, content selection, organization of educational institutions, and teacher training, contributing to the marginalization of specific social groups such as the Black population, disabled individuals, and the poor in Brazil. In order to understand the dimensions of the relationships between Education/Science Education and eugenic and hygienic ideologies in Brazilian academic production, and how the methodological approach of Historical Dialectical Materialism is used in these productions, we consulted the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations and conducted a literature review anchored in three refinements that identified a gap in the use of Marxist theoretical-methodological framework for analyzing this theme.