Do riso fez-se o pranto : Discursos sobre o magistério

Abstract

From a field research, we sought to understand how a teacher has been thinking about teaching and which is his/her conception about labor, because frequently in the different mass communication there are news bringing attention for problems faced by teachers in the everyday of the Brazilian schools, problems such as violence in class room, precarious conditions of work and retirement from work in consequence of health problems caused by teaching. The Marxist theory guided us in the understanding of the labor category, which, while as a work in general, founded the human sociability and manifestation of the worker's life, but in the capitalist society it also assumes the form of alienated labor. To reflect upon the collected speeches, we sought to understand which social and material conditions were and still are present in the development of teaching as a profession ever since its expansion in the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. Therefore, we searched through primary sources and/or authors that studied them. We identified that the growth of the educational profession occurred concomitantly to the universalization of teaching, with the creation of public schools in France. In that time the maintenance of the order became a need in the bourgeois society, because values disseminated by the liberalism such as equality, justice and love to the work no longer could be defended by the reason nor be materialized in the productive practice, being under the responsibility of those institutions the maintenance of those principles through the sensibility and appeal to the morals. Thus, the school came with the objective of disciplining the individuals to live in that social organization, and the educational work, historically, was born from the needs of the social organization in the capitalist system. In Brazil, we noticed that the development of the educational profession occurred as the same time woman's professionalization, measures that answered to the need of modernization of the Country, mainly after the proclamation of the Republic. The recovery of those historical elements served us as a base for the analysis of the interviews accomplished with ten teachers of the early years of public Elementary School of the municipal district of Campo Mourão, Paraná, in the period of February 2014. We understood that, in spite of having found different speeches on the educational profession, especially in the beginning of the 20th century and at the present time, in both moments teaching was linked to the social reproduction, assisting to the needs of capital, what configures an alienating practice. If nowadays the teachers' work seems precarious to the point of causing suffering, it is because the difficulties reported by them in relation to the work conditions are the expression of a stimulus, in the last decades, of the structural crisis that the capitalism is facing, which strikes not only the educational profession, but all the institutions created by this social organization.