Para que serve a arte na escola pública: relato de uma prática docente de estímulo à autonomia do educando

Abstract

This article arises from the ethnographic journey of an art educator newly arrived in the state public school system of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Over eight months of teaching in lower secondary education, the author confronts the narrowing of art within the school framework, where utilitarian curricula, fossilized pedagogies, and neopentecostal moralism reduce it to a disciplinary ornament. The author draws upon an extra-institutional repertoire, engaging thinkers and artists such as Herbert Read, Chuck Jones, Vincent Price, Friedrich Nietzsche, Don Graham, and Paulo Freire, to uncover, in the gaps of school programs, possibilities for experimentation and the creative autonomy of students. By refusing to frame art as content to be tamed, the text advocates for the recognition of art as an intrinsic pulse, prior to school and perhaps more powerful than it.