Tecnologia pedagógica de controle social: a fetichização da tecnologia na literatura de ficção científica

Abstract

This work is linked to the research line Educational Theories and Pedagogical Practices of the Stricto Sensu Graduate Program in Education at the Federal Institute of Goiás. The main objective of this research is to discuss technology in contemporary education based on indications of the fetishization of technology expressed in science fiction literature. This objective was established through the analysis of academic production on the relationship between education and technology and the identification of a dominant technocentric perspective. This dissertation adopts historical-dialectical materialism (Marx, 2015; Marx & Engels, 2007; Kosik, 1967) as its method of investigation and is bibliographic and exploratory in nature. We adopt historical-dialectical materialism because we understand that this method enables us to grasp the multiple determinations of the phenomenon of technology insertion in the Brazilian educational context. We understand art as a historical production capable of revealing the social contradictions and ideology of a given era. Brave New World (Huxley, 2014) was selected as the literary work to be analyzed. The methodological path for analyzing the novel is grounded in the analytical categories of commodity fetishism (Marx, 2015a) and the ideologization of technique (Vieira Pinto, 2005). The insertion of technologies in the Brazilian educational environment presents a perspective oscillating between technological determinism and instrumentalism (Peixoto, 2015; Oliveira, 2019). This perspective does not originate within the educational context itself, but rather in concrete reality, reflecting more complex political, economic, and social foundations. A dialectical reading of Brave New World (Huxley, 2014) makes it possible to understand the process of technology fetishization that governs the political, social, and economic choices related to the educational appropriation of technical objects. We conclude that the insertion of technology follows an ideologized pattern present in concrete reality and articulated with capitalist logic for the extraction of surplus value. However, even under unfavorable conditions, possibilities of resistance emerge within the Brazilian social and educational context.