The Thread and the Weave: children in the webs of power

Abstract

The subject
of this paper is the document named Referencial Curricular Nacional para a
Educação Infantil - RCN - whose purpose is to serve as a national reference to curricular
experiences in early childhood education in Brazil. Using Michel Foucault's ideas,
this article considers the proposition of curricular references as a disciplinary practice
of normalization and social control and analyzes how powerlknowledge strategies come
to be articulated to produce children's subjectivities. The study examines three themes:
the questions about quality, citizenship and development of rationality. Stressing the
connections between the curriculum and what Foucault termed discipline, the study
identifies the necessity to problematize the ways of thinking that constituted these
concepts - quality, citizenship and rationality - and their meanings as expressed in the
RCN.