Nine-year Elementary Education and the evaluation processes: strategies to govern the children population

Abstract

This paper is part of a doctorate thesis that aimed at discussing how the nine-year Elementary Education has been inserted in childhood governing practices and how these practices provide six-year-old children with another school place. The study seeks to understand what can be said and thought about spaces and places designed for children under seven years old and how this has produced childhood government, considering the notion of governmentality developed by Michel Foucault. The research material is composed of some documents related to the nine-year Elementary Education policy designed by the Ministry of Education and the Secretary of Education of the State of Rio Grande do Sul. The material also includes some reports that were published along the period in which the implementation of the nine-year Elementary Education was more intense (2005-2008). In this paper, the analysis has focused on the evaluation processes involved in that educational policy as one of the effective strategies to regulate the population. The results have pointed out the fact that contemporary educational policies, as it is the case of the nine-year Elementary Education, despite focusing on both the right to education and the universalization of school education for six-year-old children, and intending to act on school success through the strategies they use, propose new institutional models, new learning models, and new childhood and children models.