Ethos, educação e currículo: ética como saber escolar

Abstract

This research's object of study is ethics as a school knowledge. It is a bibliographic and documental research, motivated by the question; what implications will have a curricular proposal which advocates the teaching of ethics at school. This problem started because in 1997 the National Educational Ministry proposed the PCN (National Curricular Parameters - NCP) to the Brazilian educational system, in this system, ethics is a transversal theme to be developed during basic schooling. The purpose of this objective investigation is: to search for a purpose in teaching ethics in school; to answer the question of how to work in the classroom, and to think over the implications which such proposal represents to Brazilian education. The first chapter analyses, from the onto-anthropological point of view, the gnoseological and ethical aspects of the western ethos. It reviews the medieval theocentrism, which contains the Ancient Greece philosophical rationality, the Jewish religion and Christianity. It also analyses the technical-scientificism, developed from the Cartesian-Newtonian rationalism, in relation to the liberal ethos, trying to comprehend how Brazil positions itself in relation to the ethos, particularly in relation to questions connected to public and private education, ethics and citizenship. The second chapter focuses on the curriculum construction process, in the context of the relation between society and education, approaching it as a socio-cultural product. The “ new schoolism” and technicism are taken as examples of sources for the curriculum construction, a contradictory process, illustrated by critical theories which try to overcome the classical and liberal curriculum conceptions, as well as the post-critical theories, which have marked the researches in the field of curriculum. The third chapter investigates the trends and challenges which ethics, as a school knowledge, presents to society and the individuals in education. The PCN are approached in the context of public policies of the liberal ideal in education and the preasumption of the conception which links ethics and citizenship, presenting those as challenges to education. We conclude that ethics as school knowledge, from an anthropological perspective, the being of the man, can contribute to the construction of the fundamental autonomy, emancipation and human freedom.