Os discursos da UNESCO e a avaliação da alfabetização infantil na America Latina e Caribe (1980-2012) : diálogo com contexto brasileiro

Abstract

The work is a research report which general goal is to understand, actively and responsively, the UNESCO speeches, in the period of 1980-2012, on behalf of the literacy evaluation, and how they dialogue with the Brazilian context. It is based on the Bakhtinian theoretical referential and considers the assertions as links of a discursive chain that can only be comprehended in its concreteness, within an immediate production situation and a broader production context. The corpus is composed of documents published by the Education United Nations Organization (Unesco) in the period of choice, specially the Education Principal Project for Latin America and Caribbean (PPE) bulletins, the Education Regional Project for Latin America and the Caribbean Islands (Prelac) text and the magazines in connection. The research develops the thesis that all the speeches published by UNESCO, are mostly based on an education conception as financial and literacy investment as fundamental competence for the formation of citizens desired by the market. The most efficient propagation strategies of these speeches were the events promoted by UNESCO in which the participant member Estates made a compromise around goals aligned with ideas of international organisms that defend the capitalist order. Besides those goals, the PPE and Prelac projects aimed at assisting the countries regarding their educational policies adequacy and at keeping the educative speech in circulation, mainly with those having a strategic role in the countries’ decision making. The actions taken in Brazil in terms of literacy assessment, from its specific context, dialogued with the UNESCO assertions that praised it as management tool. This is observed by the implementation of evaluations with periodicity each time less in order to assess the children’s performance. Moreover, the dialogue between the Brazilian programs with the conceptions defended by this organization is also revealed in the reduction carried out by the exams concerning literacy to mechanic aspects of reading and writing, with basis on a technical and functional perspective that goes beyond its critical and dialogical potential.