Efeitos de sentido e educação na pandemia: dizeres em circulação de um porta-voz do governo

Abstract

The closing of schools and suspension of classes in Brazil, due to the pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, generated great tension for the school community and population in general. Based on this context, the proposal of this dissertation is to analyze some statements of the then Minister of Education, Milton Ribeiro, who was in charge of the ministry between July 2020 and March 2022, having as methodological support the French-Brazilian Discourse Analysis perspective. Thus, the research question that guides this dissertation is to understand the process of constitution of meanings (or effects of meaning) about public education, through the discourse in circulation in that context. Therefore, the object of study is composed of selected sayings of the former minister, highlighting others that point to the paraphrastic effect of the sayings in circulation from a particular discursive position. In this way, the research corpus was composed of discursive sequences extracted from sayings of the then Minister of Education that circulated/circulate in the media. The analysis of these sayings seeks to understand the process of discursive production that underlies them and the effects of meaning that the discourse intends to naturalize and institute. This analysis places the statements on a vertical axis, which concerns the remembrance and the regularities produced by them, and also on a horizontal axis, which refers to the commemoration that makes the members of a community seek a common identity. Both axes are converged in Milton Ribeiro's figure by means of the Pecheuxtian notion of discourse-holder subject. From these considerations, it was possible to identify some effects of updating and naturalization of meanings, which work as the discourse thread in order to link and relate the discursive sequences to each other, such as: the idea that the teachers did not work during the pandemic period and hindered the return to face-to-face classes. Another effect of meaning that was also being naturalized and that we aimed to "denaturalize" through the analysis is that "university is for the few" and that, therefore, the investments of the Ministry of Education should focus on professionalizing high schools to the detriment of public universities. The research undertaken made it possible to reflect on how the sayings take back what has already been said and establish certain meanings in order to produce an effect of evidence to the sayings in circulation about teachers in the context of the pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Therefore, it was sought to understand the effect of the ideological and political that determine the discursive practices and that make the meanings and sayings, regarding education in Brazil, naturalized and reproduced by society.