De novo a mesma história… discursos sobre a leitura e os leitores no Programa Conta pra Mim (MEC-2019)

Abstract

There have been many discussions about the need for public policies to promote reading in Brazil, especially initiatives that effectively target the socioeconomically vulnerable population. Over time, many projects, campaigns and programs have been formulated and disseminated to the population as a means of fostering interest in reading and the habit of reading. However, many of these programs were doomed to failure because they did not take into account the social and cultural reality of the target audience they claimed to contemplate and serve, nor did they tackle the causes of our unequal access to reading. What many of these projects, campaigns and programs disregard – due to negligence, strategy, or simply a lack of awareness – is the relationship between the Brazilian reality and government actions in promoting legitimized cultural practices. Thus, many children, young people and adults remain without access to an effective and efficient learning of reading, nor to quality books in abundance, to spaces and circumstances where readers can socialize, or to sufficient quality time for reading, all of which have an impact on how equality and equity of rights are promoted in our country, such as the right to be a reader, and the right to culture transmitted through books. The lack of equity results from the sociocultural gap between “heirs” and “non-heirs” (CHARTIER, 2019). In order to contribute to a better understanding of these mismatches between public policies related to the promotion of reading and the actual needs of the audiences they claim to be aimed at, we carried out qualitative research of an analytical nature, anchored in the theoretical principles of Discourse Analysis, especially those described by Michel Foucault, and the Cultural History of Reading, according to Roger Chartier, with regard mainly to his description of the representations of the popular reader throughout history. In line with the research carried out at the Laboratory of Reading Studies (LIRE - CNPq/UFSCar), in this thesis we aimed to decipher discourses on reading by describing and interpreting statements from the set of documents institutionalizing and promoting a Federal Government program, created by the Ministry of Education, entitled Conta pra Mim (2019), which is aimed – as the name suggests (in Portuguese, it means “Tell Me”) – at promoting the practice of “Family Literacy”. The analysis of the data allowed us to observe a considerable disparity between what is stated in the Program’s Directive 421, Article 2 – which states that its target audience is comprised of “families in vulnerable situations” – and what is shown in the campaigns and videos promoting the Program, whose representations of the public could not be more unrelated to the actual material conditions of the Brazilian families for whom the Program is intended. In addition to this disparity, we observed the absence and erasure of “fracturing” themes (FONSECA, 2015) in the Program’s proposed readings collection, in a clearly moralizing attempt to “sweeten” reality, which provides evidence not only of a complete detachment from the material life of the public which it claims to address, but also of an erroneous view of children's literature, guided by moralizing purposes. In these texts, there is also no representation of the ethnic-racial diversity of the Brazilian people, with the illustrations revealing a whitening ideology (HOFBAUER, 2000) in the representation of the characters in the works adapted for the Conta pra Mim (2020) collection. Prioritizing homeschooling practices, the Program, instead of effectively promoting emancipatory and critical reading practices, is built on a poor view of the “middle audience”, i.e., parents and guardians for whom the reading guidelines and book recommendations are intended, as well as a tutelary and moralistic approach to children – the end audience – favoring adaptations of low aesthetic quality, with a pragmatic-moralizing bias, thus deepening the already existing gap between social groups in the country. These are some of the results we arrived at and which we describe more fully throughout the thesis.