Biopolitics of childhood and medicalization of education in times of pandemic (covid-19) in Alagoas

Abstract

Childhood has been the target of educational and social projects that are not exempt from political neutrality, constituting in them visions of the world, society, human being, especially of childhood. According to Foucault (2014), medicine was a biopolitical strategy that intervened in the lives of populations, making bodies and minds docile to ensure a useful, healthy and submissive workforce. We start from the assumption that, historically, childhood has been the yearning of political dreams, according to Kohan (2009) in which early childhood education was the target of investments for the formation of the docile subject. childhood in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and its relationships with medical discourses and biopolitical practices in the school context of Alagoas. This work is the result of the thesis entitled Biopolitics, medicalization and the Covid-19 pandemic: knowledge, discourses and powers about childhood in Brazilian Education in the 20th and 21st centuries, in which we adopted bibliographical, documentary and case study research as a methodology. We found that bio-necropolitics translated into control of the body and life of the population in a pandemic context and generated policies to exclude students from the public network, constituting the continuation of the hygienist policy in the context of the 21st century.