The production of inclusive subjects in contemporaneity: a look at the (recent) history of school practices

Abstract

This discussion aims to understand school practices operating for the production of useful subjects to a society intended to be inclusive. Based on post-structuralist discussions and methodologically grounded on two Foucauldian tools - governmentality and subjectivation - this paper analyzes records of school practices (from different decades) from the files of a public school which is older than one century. Working on such material has enabled us to perceive discursive recurrences involved in the production of relations of government of the self and the others - the gradually increasing defense of the need for the development of school autonomy and school subjects; the encouragement of the centralization of practices not only in the contents to be learned, but also in the competences and skills to be developed; the need of self-management for the accomplishment of better life conditions, among other things - for the production of certain subjectivities whose effects are understood as mobilizing for inclusion nowadays. These issues have been regarded as displacements announcing the emergence of neoliberal governmentality, in which the meaning of the word ‘inclusion’ has acquired new contours and can be read as a State principle mobilized for population life organization in contemporaneity.