Governamentalidade, educação e normalização: as práticas de subjetivação da Universidade Aberta à Maturidade.

Abstract

In this thesis we focus on forms of education which aim the development by the elder of a certain understanding about their age and how to conduct it. We work with the notion of governmentality by Michel Foucault in order to investigate this mode of government of pluralities, exploring how intricacies of these pathways of education are conducted to control those transiting in it, and also investigate the effects of driving and publicizing power games through which suitable subjects are produced. To make comprehensible how the processes of normalization of elder’s conducts have been conducted there, we describe the Open University to Maturity (UAMA), of the State University of Paraiba, its organization and its modus operandi. The analysis of documents, interviews, and the direct observation of the classes we recorded, textbooks and films used and shown in classes, the texts produced by the students and their responses to questionnaires applied to them clarified the practices of UAMA as a set of actions to promote active aging providing health care for the elderly from lower cost solutions than those ones offered in the market. The UAMA has made possible thanks to the convergence of various interests. In its practices, based on assertions of science of aging, are used ways of educating that were already being used in the therapeutic actions to convince seniors that the transformation of their way to lead themselves is legitimate. In order to structure the field of action of these individuals and, to adjust their choices about how to live the goals of the government old age, it promotes their access to specific knowledge of the aging process and their involvement in activities that allow them to recognize themselves as subjects of Ritghs with the power and capacity to undertake changes in their way of driving their lives. The practices conducted in the UAMA environment teach them how to control their actions and feelings resulting from them. The internalization of what was learned and experienced makes possible the development of criteria to govern their actions, evaluate themselves and others. The elderly, realizing the need to transform their way of life, make use of the rules established by the educative practices to elect aspects of themselves that should be transformed, conforming to and resisting the truths they had access to, doing everything to put away from them the risks of an unhealthy old age. Making a serious effort to modify their behavior, they recognize in themselves the attributes of the ideal old man/woman in which they have been emerged. We observed the effects of the forms of education of the UAMA in the ways they see the world, and in the ways by which they can define what means to be (1) active / healthy / desirable socially or (2) sedentary / sick / undesirable old men/women within a hierarchy that places the first model as a superior age and the second model as indicative of a inferior age.