Adolescentes em situação de analfabetismo funcional: contribuições da Psicanálise

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss the results of our PhD research, whose object is the functional illiteracy among teenagers as one of the symptoms of a "malaise in education." If, from the point of view of the historical-cultural Psychology theory, puberty was the phase in which formal concepts are developed, we question, from psychoanalysis, what could have contributed to this situation of school failure. Throughout the research, we discuss how the ideals of modern education present in Vygotsky's postulate, and the very model of education discussed and also criticized by Freud seem to have failed in postmodernity. The educational proposal thought by these theorists, which would imply the consolidation of a stable world view from the intellectual and moral formation, is being called into question today. And we saw that in Brazil, the picture is even more desolating, especially regarding the education of teenagers, especially those from the suburbs, from disadvantaged social classes. The historical context of great precariousness of investments in public policies, educational projects and teacher training brings serious implications to the indexes of children and adolescents who are in school failure situation, most often for lacking properly developed reading and writing skills. And if historical-cultural psychology assumes that language plays a fundamental role in the development of formal thought and the construction of scientific concepts, for psychoanalysis it will be foundational in processes of identification and constitution of the subject of desire. In both theories, the mediation of the other through language in cultural transmission is of paramount importance. Considering the question of adolescence from psychoanalysis also involves considering the contemporary socio-cultural context. The psychic and social, that critical area between the inner world and the experiences shared in the culture and its institutions. Psychoanalysis does not disregard the role of language and education in the transmission of knowledge. But in this approach, there is always a part that escapes the education of man, in spite of all the efforts of civilization to educate them. With the concept of the Unconscious, it proposes to think of another kind of knowledge, which is closely intertwined to transmissible knowledge, which is the unconscious' knowledge. With a clinical approach based on psychoanalytic assumptions applied to education, we used as methods for intervention and research the conversation circles and the analysis of spontaneous texts of adolescents enrolled in acceleration classes groups in the Municipal Network of Education of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. For analyzing their writing and the conversation circles, we took some of the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, such as sublimation, inhibition, refusal, and the Other of Language in the constitution of the subject of the Unconscious. The results seem to confirm the psychoanalytic theoretical reflection about the phenomenon of foreclosure in post-modernity, which produces new psychopathological forms, leading to an indifferent, disinterested, inhibited, devitalized relationship with writing, characteristic of so many students of contemporary school. There are countless teenagers who have not come to constitute their own writing. Thus, voiceless and often silenced by educational programs and projects that do not recognize them as subjects of knowledge, they pass almost invisible through school.