Writing Note: The article below was written by students of psychology from the Federal University of Paraná and sent to us by the corresponding site of AND in Curitiba and the region.
The new wave of the precariousness of Brazilian education is now captained by the new high school, whose pedagogical policy annihilates the humanitarian and scientific aspects of education and reduces it to the most nefarious utilitarianism: it aims at the conformation of young people to structural unemployment, preparing them for being “entrepreneurs” pot cake and narrowing their political horizons to “what goes on”.
The implementation of such a harmful project cannot come, as is usual, without an ideological cover -up, which takes place in many ways in the current government management, Luís Inácio, after all, used the “defense of science” as one of its main Electoral motors. Thus, the attempt to implement the new high school is accompanied by several fallacies - such as the supposed importance of integral education without any investment that enables schools to apply properly to the full regime - and welfare proposals that serve more to mask the precariousness than compensate it-this is the case of the shameful “foot” of high school. We can also think of the current policy of psychology in schools as, so far, an mainly aesthetic measure.
Federal Law 13,935, 2019, approved the Social Assistance and Psychology Service in all public basic education schools and gave a year for the implementation of the program, leaving responsibility to education systems. According to the Paulista Medical Association website (APM), however, the implementation of the program only began in early 2022. In Paraná, this law remained only on paper until, it seems, the end of 2023, when a Notice was opened for hiring social and psychology professionals.
A synthesis made by APM from the 2022 school census points out that only 13% of schools in Brazil have hired psychology professionals. Private schools, however, have up to ten professionals, while the public, when they have, is just one.
Firstly, it should be noted that psychological service in schools is of paramount importance and cannot be essentially outpatient, that is, it should not have as its main function remedy situations of panic and anxiety crises. The psychologist is a professional who must be integrated with pedagogical dynamics and participate in the construction and execution of local and regional educational policies. It is essential, at this moment, that the professional class mobilizes to effect its right to be in schools and not let this law become a piece of paper among many others. This involves taking part in the struggles against the precariousness of education, being today the main one the fight against the new high school, and for a true scientific and democratic reform of education. It is worthless the existence of rights without the means to realize them. The approval of Law 13.935/2019 means nothing but demagogy about education and mental health and will continue this way without the mobilization of the class.
This understanding of the psychologist as an actor in a broader system is also important not to fall into a widely widespread conception in the press monopolies: that the psychologist is solely responsible for the “psychic welfare” of the school community. It is common, when we read reports on the performance of the psychology professional in schools, that psychological practice is reduced to the aforementioned outpatient care or, even worse, is cited as an absolute prevention for "massacres" in schools.
It should be understood that the school is not only a place where young people decorate textbooks, as the new high school intends, but it is, for much of the youth, the essential pole of socialization and construction of meanings of life. Cases of massacres in schools cannot be understood as the work of anomalous individuals, with some syndrome, whom merely lacked individual psychological counseling. On the contrary, it is a symptom of bankruptcy of the humanizing potential of the educational system.
Therefore, it is essential for psychologists who work or intend to work in the educational system that organize themselves-in addition to the struggles of their professional class to effect hiring-along with students and other education professionals in the fight against a precarious, anti-cinientific and utilitarian project of education. The new high school mutilates the school's humanizing potential and makes it an increasingly conducive space for psychological suffering, marginalization and violence. A policy worthy of mental health in education depends on a pedagogical policy that transforms the school into a democratic, scientific and progressive polo, not an unemployed entrepreneur factory.