The Escola Ativa Program, multi-seriated country schools and mathematical education

Abstract

The article discusses the Escola Ativa (Active School) Program (EAP), a federal public policy addressed to multi-seriated country schools, which has special focus on the area of mathematics. The theoretical framework for the study consists in an ethnomathematics perspective developed in dialogue with ideas from the later works of Wittgenstein and with those of Foucault. From the latter, the main notion utilized here is that of governmentality. The research material includes documents made available by the EAP and questionnaires filled by teachers responsible for formation courses in the State of Rio Grande do Sul. The analysis discloses a tension between the pedagogical guidelines offered to teachers and the activities proposed to the pupils in the area of mathematics, and also that the program steers the conduct of teachers, pupils and, more broadly, of the local population. By regulating this population, the program works as a government device that institutes a depoliticized and romantic view of the countryside, trivializes the need for theorization in the conception of educative processes, and situates life in the countryside at a level inferior to that of urban life. This is expressed in a more specific way in the mathematical education, particularly in geometry: strategies are put in motion by EAP in order to reinforce this hierarchizing process, which ultimately is a process of (re)production of inequalities. Therefore, the urban and country populations are signified not only as different, but as unequal.