MEDICALIZING AND PATHOLOGIZING PRACTICES IN EDUCATION: the inventions of diseases-of-not-learning and diseases-of-not-behaving
Medicalization, childhood, classical psychiatry.
We understand that medication is a technological device in the medical field, capable of intervening in the social imaginary and solving any demand, even if it is of the subjective order of the human. Thus, we take the concept of medicalization as a contemporary form of governmentality and biopower ready to meet a policy of political control of bodies and life. In the field of education, there are pathological inventions, which we name as the diseases-of-not-learning and the diseases-of-not-behaving that emerge from the medical-pharmaceutical field and produce diagnoses, prescriptions and unnecessary ingestion of drugs in the childhood. These medicalizing and pathologizing practices are based on the economic interests of pharmaceutical industry lobbies and transform everyday life situations into diseases that do not exist. Based on these facts, we aim with a study based on qualitative research to investigate the conceptions of teachers of the initial grades regarding the phenomenon of medicalization of school failure.