As (im)possibilidades do ensino da filosofia em um curso preparatório para o vestibular

Abstract

This doctoral thesis is part of a line of research on the topic School Practices and Public Policies from the Program of Graduate Studies of the Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM). Its object of study is a reflection on the teaching of philosophy in a preparatory course for the entrance exam, which emerged from the dialogue between the readings in Michel Foucault and my teaching practice. The overall objective of this thesis is to discuss the limits and possibilities of teaching philosophy as a technologie of the self that is constituted as resistance to political governanment in a preparatory course for the entrance exam. The study analyzes, from a Foucauldian inspiration, the conditions for the emergence of the discourse about the importance of philosophy in the entrance exam to UFSM and its implications; the limits to problematize and the (im) possibilities to produce the teaching of philosophy in a preparatory course for the entrance exam; and it proposes that a governamentality technology may constitute a government technology itself that points to an ethical dimension founded in the care of life and truth. To confirm the thesis former students of the preparatory course for the entrance exam, enrolled in the first and second half of the years 2012 and 2013 in the discipline of Philosophy (the investigated universe consists of 855 students) were interviewed. Through the interviews we could confirm the thesis that teaching philosophy in a preparatory course for the entrance exam may be a space of resistance to this neoliberal governmentality in that it becomes a practice of the self.