A biblioteca nas escolas públicas municipais de Manaus (2001/2010): prática social a serviço da emancipação ou da barbárie?

Abstract

This work aims at discussing the presence and the role of the library in the public schools of Manaus from 2001 to 2010. It is believed that libraries are cultural products created by men to help them achieve their goals and their individual and collective projects. This happens according to their visions of world and of society. Their existence and actions are both conditioned by the hegemonic cultural values of its time and place, which is a subordination that can lead them to serve either the emancipation or the barbarism, depending on the nature of the contribution given to the civilizing process of the society in which they are inserted. This research has been motivated by the meaning that the contribution to the civilizing process provided by school libraries has. The social reality of the field throughout the country fosters the defense of the thesis that the school library is an educational service and a social practice geared to the production of symbolic cultural heritage. Nevertheless, it is not necessarily a factor of emancipation. We have researched the living conditions and the factors that hindered and prevented carrying out the responsibilities of libraries as an educational service and as a social practice for the cultural education of students in order to infer the nature of their contribution. Being qualitative in nature, this work makes use of the social theory method to situate the school library in the context of society, using as reference its insertion in the fields of culture and education. It also makes use of emancipation categories and symbolic violence to analyze the information on their concrete social reality. The sample was defined by the technique of single sampling. Seven public schools in Manaus from the existing 366 were chosen, one for each District Division. In addition to consultation of available literature, the research required also field research and analysis of information. The literature research was operated both presentially and virtually in order to provide theoretical foundation and to locate the legal texts on national and local public policies on the school library system. The field research involved documentary and personal sources. The documentary section was gathered at the Municipal Education Office (SEMED), in schools and in the Official Gazette of the Municipality. With the documents at hand, we sought to identify the type of participation the library has in the organizational structure of SEMED as well as in its political-educational school projects. The personal information was collected through semi-structured interviews applied to former secretaries, managers, educators and people responsible for libraries and reading rooms of the chosen schools. The analysis revealed that the insertion of the school library in the official documents of public policies of national and local education is minimal and ineffective to justify its existence in the elementary schools. The Law of Guidelines and Bases of National Education does not even mention it; the National Education Plan only includes it in the objective referring to the development of national minimum standards of education infrastructure. The 1997 National Curriculum Standards only recommend its inception in schools as a condition for the formation of good readers. The administrative regulations of the municipal authorities and the pedagogical orientations of SEMED just mention libraries in the organizational structure of that entity and there are rare political- school pedagogical projects that present objective information on the organization and functioning of libraries in the schools. The conclusion we come to shows that there is no evidence that the libraries studied in the period were instrumented to contribute positively to the social and political emancipation of its users. Only one exception has been identified. So, their functioning tend to have contributed much more to a regression to barbarism than to the emancipation of the subject.