CURRICULUM AND SCHOOL KNOWLEDGE AS EPISTEMOLOGICAL MEDIATORS OF THE PROJECT OF NATION AND CITIZENSHIP

Abstract

This paper addresses the dialogue between curriculum and school knowledge, facing the growing demands and educational responsibilities, not typically the school ones, originated in the last decades of the twentieth century. It recognizes and names the tensions inherent in the contemporary educational context and its variables and, in order to foster dialogue, revisits the roots of the new school integral education, as well as the milestones for the construction of Brazilian education policies culminating with the National Common Curricular Base. It discusses about the epistemological centrality of school knowledge that is the purpose of the school and its coherent competence as a social agency of knowledge formation of generations. The paper contributes with the dialogue pointing out ways to construct a curricular design that brings social knowledge closer to cultural, linguistic, scientific and historical knowledge, in order to consolidate a school work of cognitive skill formation of students in the participation of life and a dignified collective living. It provisionally and worriedly concludes that the cultural and political variables that marked the scenario where curricular debate occurred are organized around the lack of strategic thinking about curriculum, the lack of clarity of what school knowledge is as an epistemological space of development of the thought of a country, and a lack of definition of the function of the state as a social institution that takes care of education as a right of all and as public well-being.