O Programa Creche Escola e sua(s) concepção(ões) de Educação Infantil: entre o Estado e o Município
Resumen
The state program Creche Escola intends to expand early childhood education services
primarily in areas with greater social vulnerability and shortage of vacancies, through an
agreement signed between the State of São Paulo and the associated São Paulo
municipality under the constitutional system of collaboration. While the purpose of this
program is the construction and equipping of early childhood education units for
municipalities with state resources, the state starts to act in a modality that is not
mandatory, which instigated us to investigate the conception(s) of early childhood
education involved in the program, taking into account the state perspective and the
municipal perspective, based on the case study of Araraquara/SP (2011-2018). For this
purpose, we conducted a qualitative data study, a case study, whose methodological
path involved the execution of ethical procedures, bibliographic, documentary and
empirical characters, manifested through a semi-structured interview. The state proposal
is significant when it is proposed to finance early childhood education units, given the
high demand for vacancies and the municipal recourse limitations to offer them
properly. However, the Creche Escola, anchored in the precepts of the New Public
Management, denotes a private view of care, notably by targeting especially the most
vulnerable and by idealizing a practical architectural project at minimum cost. Not by
chance, as seen, that such architectural design does not conceive the pedagogical
specificities of the young child, since, taking the economic logic into consideration, it
represents the impoverishment of the school infrastructure, which is reduced to a space
of shelter and care for toddlers and a space that prepares primary education for the older
children, leaving aside the fun and the playfulness and giving their underprivileged
children a poor education. However, in practice, despite the fact that the municipality
has to follow the building project according to the definitions and conceptions of the
state, Araraquara, for its solid history in early childhood education, with its own
architectural design and a standard child care, tries to print in spaces of the Creche
Escola unit a conception of similar education, which does not separate education and
caring, relating both to fun and playfulness. As we have seen, within the Creche Escola
Program, the pedagogical and administrative work of the new units are responsibility of
the municipality, according to its network and its conceptions, so that there is a
tendency for the Program to sustain various conceptions of early childhood education
under the same architectural design, depending on the associated municipality.