A inserção do serviço social na educação básica do Brasil: demarcações histórico-conceituais e os desafios do trabalho profissional

Abstract

Study on the insertion of Social Work into basic education policy in Brazil, apprehended within the contradictory movement of neoliberal educational reforms oriented toward market interests, against which stands the professional ethical-political project linked

to the historical necessity of human emancipation. The study seeks to capture the ne- xus between labor, education, and Social Work, particularized in the historical process

of the constitution of professional practice within the educational field, situated in the

totality of the social relations of dependent Brazilian capitalism. It starts from the un- derstanding of education as a strategy for the emancipation of the historical subject,

constituted within the sphere of class struggle and tensioned by societal projects

whose contradictions are reproduced in antagonistic policies and expressed in the con- duct of educational policies and in the forms of organization of school work. The rese- arch analyzes how contemporary transformations in the world of labor and educational

policy, guided by neoliberal logic, reconfigure the tendencies that shape professional

practice and the provision of basic education, imposing new demands on the interven- tion of social workers, marked by focalization, precariousness, and the expansion of

poverty-management strategies. In this context, it demonstrates that professional in- sertion in this field is configured as a historical process crossed by tendencies and

disputes, in which institutional demands and the possibilities for constructing practices oriented toward the guarantee of rights and toward the horizon of human emancipation are articulated in contradictory ways. The reflections indicate that the insertion of social

workers into basic education takes place amid concrete conditions marked by structu- ral and institutional limits, but also by possibilities for critical intervention. It is

highlighted that the tendencies identified in the academic production reveal an inter- vention tensioned between practices of an assistentialist and developmentalist nature

and strategies aimed at defending and expanding the realization of rights, evidencing the centrality of the dispute over social direction and consciousness within the school environment. It is understood that the consolidation of this professional insertion, also materialized in the achievement of Law No. 13,935/2019, remains conditioned by the correlations of forces that structure class society. In this sense, the study reaffirms the contradictory and strategic character of social workers’ intervention in basic education, which is not reduced to the implementation of policies or the formal expansion of rights, but is constituted as a field of disputes in which professional intervention can tension

the reproduction of inequalities and contribute to the construction of processes of criti- cal consciousness formation toward human emancipation.