Globalization, education and (re) institutionalization of contemporary childhood

Abstract

In the actual conditions of modernity, the complex, tense and intrinsically contradictory process of the social globalization is developed in the educative field in peculiar way, configuring the public education of masses as a field of constraints and possibilities, in some levels. The tension between the constraints and the possibilities is inherent to the ruled or emancipatory orientation promoted by the hegemonic globalization or by the anti hegemonic globalization, respectively. The inherent contradictions to the structuration of the educative public space express in “long term” e in the construction of the concrete educative politics. The expansion of the public school of masses, its extension and widening and the construction of a universal model of configuration of the educative institutions, curricula pertaining to school and practical and dynamic the pedagogical ones constitute the essential aspect of the globalization in “long term”. The promotion of educational rights and its universalization, the generalization of the access to education, without restrictions of classes, race, gender, ethnic, geographic space or “disability”, still that not total carried through, it suffered progresses you designated. Furthermore, the educative field constitutes a space of permanent tension enters the reproduction of the social inequalities and the promotion of expansion politics, for saw educative, of the social rights. The contradictions are expressed in the interior of the regulating space of the agencies of control and educational examination and in the internal tensions of the national educative systems in the peripheral and half-peripherals countries. In the plan of the construction of the concrete educative politics, the tensions have expression in the generalization of the neoliberal politics, with the fast expansion of the privatized orientations and the imposition of the market logic, through measures of evaluation of schools, pupils and teachers, guided for the competition and the efficiency of results, with the inherent selectivity process and social segregation, on the other hand, and the search of resistant affirmation of an educative public space, for another one. However, the inherent tensions to the globalization in the educative field lose much of its intelligible without reference to the globalization of childhood, that is, to the process of reinstitutionalization of contemporary childhood. As well as the modernity, which created the public school, it created the idea contemporary of childhood, the current phase of modernity places the school and childhood under a felt process of redefinition of senses and of lapsing. Here it is also analytically useful the distinction between “long term” effect and immediate impacts of concrete politics. In the domain of the “long term” effect, the tension is developed between a conception of the infancy that perspective the child as consumer of the global market of products for childhood – a conception which is as much cultivated as tirade, in the interior of the neo-consevative speech, for the inherent vulnerability and lost of the children’s innocence to which the market, over all of the average, compels - and a conception of citizenship of childhood, for the expansion of its social rights, either in the formal plan, through nominated the promulgation of the Convention of the Rights of the Child, either in the plan of the recognition of the children as social actors within by operation of law in some spheres of the social life. In the domain of the impacts of the concrete politics, the tension expresses enters the over regulation of the “métier de l’enfant”, interpreted as “métier d’élève”, by the direct share of the skilful devices and powerful instances that determine the execution of the politics for the children and the emancipator cosmopolitism movement, normally shielded normally in ONG that support the active participation of the children in the construction of its worlds of life. The analysis of the educative politics, in the comparative plan, will have everything to also gain with a look that not only crosses the effect of “long term” with the concrete politics, but that it also makes it from the social construction of infancy, that is in the ways of regulation of the worlds of life of the children through the process of “symbolic administration” of the generations youngest. This analytical look is indispensable for the sustainment of educative politics anti-hegemonic, emancipated, integrated and promotional of the active citizenship of childhood.