O enunciado “os alunos não aprendem matemática por ‘falta de base’” em questão

Abstract

This thesis aims to discuss one of the statements that is part of the discourse of School Mathematics Education: "The students do not learn Mathematics by 'lack of basic skills'”. The study uses the following Foucault’s notions: statement, discourse, truth and regimes of thruth. The research material analized consists of utterances of a college group of the Teacher Induction Program (Pibid), which emerged from interviews, field diary, and their final reports; and also for theses, dissertations and scholarly articles from the period of 1996 to 2014, available on the website of Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel portal (CAPES) and the media, referring to the statement object of the study. The analysis of the research material showed: 1) the recurrence of utterances that link the difficulty in learning Mathematics to "lack of basic skills" of students; 2) The statement "The students do not learn Mathematics by 'lack of basic skills' " is interlaced with two other statements presented in the pedagogical discourse: a) The scholar Mathematics is consisted of a hierarchical set of knowledges (which has close ties with the statement - The mathematical knowledge is hierarchical); b) The school curriculum is hierarchical, thus, follows a linear ordering.