School psychology and the search for a critical conception of science

Another important field in which Vygotsky’s theory has evidence in Brazil is school psychology. Even before the arrival of Vygotsky’s works in Brazilian lands, we highlight the approach of the area with Marxist and Marxian ideas, in a movement of searching for references to overcome the biologizing and individualizing hegemonic explanations about school failure, prevalent until the ’80s. In this field, we highlight the works of Maria Helena de Souza Patto, professor at the Institute of Psychology of the University of Sao Paulo (IPUSP), especially the works Psicología e ideología (1981) and A produfao do Fracasso Escolar: historias de submissao e rebeldía (1990)”, respectively her doctoral and associate professor thesis (Toassa, 2016).

In these works, Patto, using the theoretical framework of historical materialism and authors such as Marx, Gramsci. Althusser, Heller, Kosik, among other foreign and Brazilian Marxists, makes a profound analysis of how psychology is constituted as an ideological science, which corresponds to positivist ideals of science. For the author, hegemonic explanations about school failure focus exclusively on the child, especially the poor child, public school student, the causes for “not learning”. Among hegemonic conceptions of learning disabilities, Patto mentions racial theories, differential psychology, psychometrics and the theory of cultural deprivation. According to the researcher, they are »historical conceptions that take as natural what is social, as social what is political, as cause what is consequence, and as abstraction what is concrete reality of mankind (Patto, 1997).

From the radical criticism of these conceptions. Patto proposes an epistemological turn in the understanding of the “learning difficulties” that are now analyzed from his institutional and political production as school failure (Toassa, 2016). Thus, the author denounces the production of failure resulting from the precarious working conditions of education professionals, the humiliation and prejudice practices present at school, the education policies that generate obstacles to educational practices, among other factors.

Patto’s critique is a turning point for Brazilian school psychology that will need to review its studies and conceptions. The author brings dialectical historical materialism as a central method to the analysis of school failure, but resorts much more to authors of sociology and education, producing a sociological analysis of the phenomenon, which partly rejects the theories of psychology.

It is in the ’90s that a generation of school psychologists, some of them guided by Patto, will reconcile with psychology, seeking to reconstruct this field from the movement of criticism of the relations between psychology and education. At this time, anthologies organized by Machado and Souza (1997) and Tanamachi et al. (2000) are published. These and other works published throughout the 1990s and early 2000s sought to build new theoretical and methodological foundations for psychology at school in a critical perspective.

Historical-cultural psychology appears as one of the theoretical possibilities for the constitution of critical school psychology, and Vygotsky, Luria, Leontiev, Davidov, Bozhovich, Elkonin, Galperin, among others, as reference in the works of the field. We highlight their studies on the relations between development and learning, thought and language, experiences, conscience, mediation, social environment and role of school activity, with a predominance of a social perspective defending the valorization of education as a process of democratization of school knowledge, as debated by Saviani’s historical-critical pedagogy. We can also frequently notice the significance of contributions of the dialectical materialist method in School Psychology'.

Currently, cultural-historical psychology is one of the predominant references in school psychology' as we can see in the works presented in events of the area, for example, in the National Congresses of School Psy'chology (CONPE), organized by the Brazilian Association of School and Educational Psychology (ABRAPEE), and in the publications of the main journal of the area, the Brazilian Journal of School and Educational Psychology, also produced by ABRAPEE.