The pathological undisciplined in Augusto Cury

an analysis of self-improvement discursiveness for educators

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the overflow of self-improvement literature in Education and to understand, based on Augusto Cury's pieces of work, the discursiveness that circulates and produces a categorization of the undisciplined subject in today's school. For this analysis, I align with Foucauldian studies and look for relations of knowledge and power that lead to division practices by categorizing specific individuals as undisciplined and not others. I also looked at the discursive networks that support the update of this mode of visibility. Focusing on the discursivities present in Cury's writings, I elaborated the axis of analysis that presents ways of understanding disturbances of the mind as central to the categorization: the pathological undisciplined. With this axis, I produced three argumentative divisions: Causes, Management and resolution and Characteristics. Thus, the pathological undisciplined is produced by utterances that recognize it from characteristics of disturbances of the mind and behavior, Accelerated Thinking Syndrome, excessive tiredness, irritability, anxiety, fatigue, and information beyond the brain's processing capacity. The cause is a pathologizing society, a society that produces disease. The solution is educational actions that teach each one to take care of themselves, individualization and division of themselves and the outside. A need to manage oneself with tools seen as adequate is what educators need to be attentive to, the gaze that examines, perceives, and has the correct tools for self-management of the mind and emotions. In this way, I seek to contribute to both: the discussions about the proliferation of self-improvement in Education and to propose elements that help to denaturalize how an individual is categorized as undisciplined.