Childhood and Normativity in the BNCC: Meaning Effects and Silencings

Abstract

This article analyzes the meanings produced about childhood in the discourse of the BNCC and the silencing resulting from the construction of an idealized child subject. The research is grounded in French Discourse Analysis, which understands discourse as a space of dispute and the production of meaning. Fragments of the BNCC (2017) were examined in articulation with statements from militant texts, academic works, and pedagogical experiences that challenge the homogeneous conception of childhood present in the document. The analysis shows that the child subject summoned by the BNCC is shaped by a developmentalist and neoliberal logic, disregarding the concrete conditions of Brazilian children and silencing markers such as class, race, territory, and disability. By mobilizing the concepts of discursive formation, subject, silence, and conditions of production, the study demonstrates that such silencing is not fortuitous but results from ideological choices inscribed in the discursive materiality of curricular policy. The confrontation with other discursive materialities makes it possible to identify displacements and forms of resistance that reinscribe childhood as a plural, situated experience traversed by structural inequalities. In this way, the article contributes to the denaturalization of the official curriculum, problematizing the effects of the homogenization of childhood and affirming the need to recognize the multiple childhoods that constitute the Brazilian educational reality.