It’s not enough to be a woman... It’s not enough to like children... “Caring/education” as an interdependent principle on Childhood Education

Abstract

This article is part of a doctorate thesis whose focus was the teacher’s work on Childhood Education. In that thesis, the aim was comprehending how men constitute themselves as teachers in education of children from zero to six years old – once it was an occupation tipically characterized as feminine. In order to do that, it was chosen a social and anthropological perspective and from that it is explained and conceptualized the central theoretical category of the study – gender relations, understanding them as a social construction from which it is possible to comprehend how the hierarchy, difference and power mould, install and act in identities and in institutional spaces. This text emphasized the concept of caring/education as an indissociable principle on Childhood Education, coming from the assumption that human body is a fundamental perspective in the debate on minor childhood. From empirical data, it became necessary to problematize the discussion on Childhood Education about the concepts and practices that the binomial care/education of small children are assuming, considering the work made by male teachers in daycare centers and childhood education centers in Florianopolis city, Santa Catarina state, Brazil. The main preoccupation here is about how care was conceived when teachers have acted in daycare centers, concerning the meanings about small children education and expliciting concepts and speeches about “care”. In order to understand it, it was necessary investigating in which measure “care” as a social and cultural practice and, in the case of this study, developed by men and women in daycare centers; makes possible to move forward in relation to ambiguities in care-and-education, care-education or care/education expressions, writings that are being used by many authors with similar meanings.