Novos olhares sobre as origens da educação e da escola (e sobre o que é educação)

Abstract

Our goals with this thesis were to present a conception of education that goes beyond the somewhat instrumental and limiting definitions of what it is, and to investigate the origin of educational institutions in ancient Egypt and ancient Greece. To this end, we traced the origin of education back to its origin, which coincides with the origin of humankind, developing a socio-historical-ontological conception of education. That is, education constitutes a primordial ontological category, which, together with other categories, is also the foundation of the human being and is characterized by being a social practice that permeates and transversalizes all other social complexes or categories, whose role is to perpetuate, disseminate, and transform material and immaterial content important and necessary for the survival and existence of humankind through a collective and social teaching-learning process. Regarding the origin of the school institution, the development of productive forces and their corresponding relations of production imposed social demands that could no longer be met by the type of education existing in the primitive communist mode of production. Thus, with the development of new forms of social production (sedentary agriculture, commerce), the advent and use of writing, new technical knowledge (surveying, mathematics, astronomy), political knowledge (State, legislation, law) and their corresponding social relations (castes, orders, social classes), in addition to economic surplus, private property, patriarchy, etc., the school assumed primitive forms in ancient Egypt and ancient Greece, through formal teaching-learning activities. And, to obtain such results, we based ourselves on historical materialism and the concept of mode of production, which provided the epistemological and methodological foundations for the elaboration of our work.