The object of knowledge of physical education

The DCC present an introductory text about the subject of PE, followed by the general objectives. In DCC1, the text starts with a citation that, although without reference to the source, is a fragment extracted from the work of PE authors who mention the National Curriculum Guidelines for physical education courses (DCNEF):

As already pointed out in the Curricular Guidelines for the Final Years, PE is an area of knowledge and professional intervention that has as its object of study and application the human body and movement, focusing on the different forms and modalities of physical exercise, gymnastics, games, sports, dance, and wrestling, from the perspectives of prevention of health problems, cultural formation, and motor education and re-education. (^{CAMPINAS, 2012}, p. 140).

By reproducing the DCNEF, the DCC disregards, on the one hand, the criticisms made to this publication, reinforcing neoliberal political aspects, since these DCNEF focus on the primacy of know-how, valuing training based on competencies and skills. On the other hand, they hinder teaching practice and weaken the academic debate about the object of knowledge and the specificity of PE. Not surprisingly, many criticisms of its link to neoliberalism resonate in the literature (^{FRIZZO, 2010}; ^{TAFFAREL; SANTOS JÚNIOR, 2010}; ALVIANO JÚNIOR, 2011; LEMOSet al., 2012). In this area, it is evident in the DCC the absence of any mention of the history of physical education in Brazil and, with it, of the disputes that have marked throughout its trajectory the definitions of its social role, the criteria for the selection of its contents, and the production of teaching knowledge (^{SOUZA JÚNIOR; GALVÃO, 2005}), naturalizing the historical, social, and political character that any school discipline carries with it.

The definition of the object of PE is related to how its forms of intervention will be carried out (^{BRACHT, 1999a}). Such as the DCNEF, the DCC1 considered the body and the human movement as the object of study of PE, focusing on different ways to treat them. This position takes us back to the moment when Brazilian PE started to absorb discourses on motor learning, motor development, psychomotricity, and philosophical anthropology, favoring biopsychosocial conceptions, which fostered changes in the object of study of PE. At that time, the field of Physical Education was marked by a broad process of questioning about the specificities of its performance (^{MEDINA, 1983}; ^{DAOLIO, 1995}; ^{SOARES, 1996}; ^{BRACHT, 1999a}), and the term human movement or human motricity was considered. This perspective exalts the importance of movement for the integral development of the human being (^{BRACHT, 1999a}).

These analyses gain strength because one can notice, in the DCC, the lack of references to the concepts of body and movement, naturalizing what this might be. ^{Bracht (1999a)} states that these are two distinct objects of study in PE, guided by different epistemological visions. There is more! ^{Santin (2003)} explains that human movement presents different conceptions. It can be understood as motor action, as productive force or energy, as locomotion, and as language. The complexity increases, because language can also be understood from semiotic, phenomenological, structuralist, and post-structuralist assumptions. This produces curricula, objectives, content, pedagogical practices, forms of evaluation, and teaching roles that are coherent with the epistemological basis that underlies them. Not by chance, in PE, authors such as ^{Betti et al. (2014)}, ^{Kunz (1994)}, ^{Soares et al. (1992)}, and ^{Neira and Nunes (2009)} approach their studies with expressive body language gestures that have different purposes and didactics.

We understand that this generates great risk to pedagogical practice, because of the epistemological confusion regarding the conception of PE adopted by the DCC. According to the above, PE teachers will approach human movement according to what they understand it to be, or, even, mixing the conceptions, as it is usually noted. After all, if they follow the DCC, they will aim at physical fitness, the mastery of motor skills to perform body practices, health promotion, motor re-education for those with psychomotor disorders, and also cultural formation, which is also not explained. All this only in the early grades of elementary school. Without a doubt, this is an unlikely mission.

Although not the subject of this analysis, confusion is also present in the Guidelines for the final years, announced in the DCC in a footnote, and which determined the directions of the 2012 guidelines. In them it is stated that the proposals were:

Prepared between 2009 and 2010. Physical education teachers, gathered in a specific training group, developed a qualitative research mapping the existing pedagogical practices in this component in the Municipal Network of Campinas (RMC). The research resulted in the definition of the following manifestations of Body Culture of Movement for the RMC: play, sport, dance, gymnastics, and healthy living. (^{CAMPINAS, 2012}, p. 140).

In this excerpt, in which one can see how the various pedagogical practices will influence the recontextualization process, we highlight two aspects that reinforce the previous analysis. The first is the use of the term body culture of movement, presented by ^{Bracht (1999a)} as another object of physical education, which, as we know, is linked to critical theories.

Critical theories affirm the curriculum as part of the social and political web that characterizes society, denying any notion of neutrality in education, and encompassing the broader social structure, connecting education, politics, and society with an action aimed at social transformation (^{SILVA, 1997}). In this perspective, the term body culture is related to the affirmation of class interests of the popular classes (^{SOARES et al., 1992}) or to the emancipation from the dominant forms of sport (^{KUNZ, 1994}).

The second is the use of the term healthy living as a manifestation of body culture of movement. In the DCC, the term healthy living is presented according to the World Health Organization’s definition. By treating the notion of healthy living as a manifestation of body culture, it ends up bringing together objects from different epistemological fields – in this case, one from the order of medical normalization and another from the field of symbolic representations. With this, it favors the consolidation of the use of body practices as a dispositive for the medicalization of society (^{CRISÓRIO, 2003}).

We understand that, beyond the issues of maintaining the normality curves of the population’s health, such an attempt is also aimed at issues concerning behavioral change. After all, the DCC present the manifestations as contents of the PE area, and these should be elaborated within the typology of contents: conceptual, procedural, and attitudinal. These classifications constituted the curricular principles proposed by Ralph Tyler at the end of the 1940s, which, based on technical rationality, have hegemonically guided the organization of curricula in the West until today (^{SILVA, 1997}). They have become the most powerful instrument for defining and organizing the curriculum by establishing criteria for the elaboration of objectives, selection and organization of teaching activities, purposes, and forms of evaluation. Emphasizing on behavioral change, it has contributed to the achievement of efficient educational goals, i.e., a curriculum focused on efficiency for increased productivity and the adequacy of students to the impositions of the labor market.

In Brazil, Tyler’s model was updated in the 1990s with the discussion of the curriculum by competencies (^{LOPES; MACEDO, 2011}). This discussion resulted in the National Curricular Parameters (PCN), in which the DCC and many official curriculum programs are based on. In the case of DCC, what we see is the same curricular program, resized. It is worth pointing out that the PCN, both the general and the PE ones, have been criticized. In the case of PE, which at the time was still experiencing a moment of understanding the articulation between its knowledge of physical activity and sports and the contributions of biopsychosocial theories and those of the Human Sciences, the result was disastrous. Despite affirming body culture as the object of PE, the PCN pasteurized curricula with different epistemological bases (psychomotor, developmental, health, and critical), placing them as progressive and weakening the critical aspect of the term body culture. Undoubtedly, the DCC materialize the damage produced by the PE PCN, reproducing and consolidating them.

^{Bracht (1999b)} states that, in the model of technicist schooling, the body undergoes several interventions to adapt it to the demands of the social forms of organizing production and reproduction of life. It is antagonistic for a text that aims at a critical understanding of the elements that make up body culture to present aspects that are anchored in curricular principles that are criticized by critical pedagogies. In the field of these analyses, the emphasis on the acquisition of competencies, as proposed by the PCN, cannot be disregarded. Competency, as ^{Foucault (2008b)} explained, is seen in the theory of human capital – basis of American neoliberal thought –, as part of the worker, as “a resource, a capital that the subject makes available and that transforms it into a machine, which will produce income flows” (p. 309). Since the subject is a machine that cannot become obsolete, the principles of healthy living contemplated in the document are justified.

The definition of the object of PE in the Guidelines reinforces that they result from a major dispute, which takes place in the context of production and dissemination of curriculum policy texts (^{BALL, 1994}). The State is the center that produces and disseminates policies and reflects the conflicts produced by epistemic communities; this is a field of enunciation, negotiation, and articulation of meanings that support political interests. The texts produced are addressed to accommodate more general demands of public interest. They are educational discourses formulated in other spheres and appropriated by the various local governments in a recontextualized way. ^{Ball (2002)} reinforces that these texts need to be legitimized in the process of negotiation between the different groups and subjects that take part in it. Not by chance, local administrations resort to renowned researchers, established companies in the sector, or, as is the case in Campinas, a group of permanent professors. The result is often ambivalent texts. These texts are dated and characterized by the space of their production.

We understand that this confusion favors the new biopolitical processes⁷ in progress. Even though the school remains as a disciplinary institution and PE holds the exclusivity of education for the government of the bodies, one can see that the announced object is also the same as that of other spaces where body practices occur in a commercial way, such as schools for sports, swimming, fighting, dancing, gyms, and psychomotor re-education clinics. For ^{Dardot and Laval (2016)}, the new subject of neoliberalism is marked by competition and performance, it is an entrepreneur produced to win and be successful, which gives the competitive sport other contours.

If, during the 20th century, sport served as a model to identify the superiority of nations, serving the interests of capitalism, Nazism, fascism, and socialism, now, neoliberalism gives it another purpose: to spread a way of being. The sports schools, as an investment, become laboratories to forge not only the champion subject, but to potentiate the lifestyle of the one who invests in oneself, overcomes oneself, takes care of their body, a way of being whose goal is to improve oneself all the time. Thus, putting the body in motion can be considered an essential element, both from the point of view of government actions derived from the State, and from those arising from forms of self-government mediated by the market, aiming at the government of populations based on consumption and pleasure (^{CÉSAR; DUARTE, 2009}).

Encompassing a little bit of everything, the object of study of PE present in the DCC propagates medical, anthropological, and social discourses, which circulate in the field of physical education in an uncritical way. The DCC announces that the teacher training policy will mobilize multiple human, material, and symbolic resources for its execution. Their contradictory ideas call for PE professionals who work in fields that are distinct and distant from the school, favoring the discursive event of teacher inefficiency (^{NUNES; NEIRA, 2018}). Therefore, it will favor the presence of subjects and groups that act and specialize in the segment of professional education, turning it into another commodity to be disputed. In view of this, it is impossible not to mention issues of meritocracy, as it is propagated by neoliberalism. What is announced is the consolidation of a society hierarchically determined by those who have specialized and by the quality of human capital they have managed to access and obtain through education. Inserted in this process of social normalization and standardization, municipal network teachers are responsible for making this wheel turn.

The general objectives of physical education

To assist in the understanding of the analysis and discussion of this study, we created three charts to visualize the goals of physical education present in the DCC:

As stated in the previous topic, the teaching objectives should have as their starting and ending point the understanding of the object of knowledge on which they are anchored. Since DCC expresses the body, human movement, and body culture as objects of PE, we also take them for analysis. We point out that several objectives announced in the DCC are found in other official curriculum documents, such as the PCN, reinforcing the influence they exert on the pedagogical discourse. Others, such as, for example, objectives 3 and 6 in Chart 3 are present on a large scale in school PE, regardless of the conception of PE. One more highlight: we identified few objectives aligned to the critical curriculum and objectives that treat human movement as language. The others are aligned to the traditional curricula in PE recognized as psychomotor, developmental, and renewed health (^{NEIRA; NUNES, 2009}).

Another interesting aspect is the larger number of objectives proposed for the first cycle of the initial grades compared to the others, and the absence of objectives related to human development in the final grades and adult education. We can infer that these data express a conception of childhood, since the early grades present objectives that are anchored in the first stages of human development and the final grades present more critical objectives. It is implied that only adults are able to address critical aspects, and that children are limited to concrete aspects of development. In the same vein, we realize that, despite all the academic production, debates, and public policies for adult education, the production of the same objectives for students in the final years of elementary school and for adults shows that the DCC do not recognize the specificity of this group. The result can only be the same: the adaptation from one to the other, with inevitable losses for those who return to education (^{ARROYO, 2006}). We also highlight the presence of objectives that are not specific to PE, but are part of all schooling, when it address the body with the role of training for efficient models, as is the case of objective 4 of Cycle 1, 1 of Cycle 2, and 1 of the final years and adult education. There is also an unknown aspect, because objective 5 of Cycle 1 does not say what it refers to.

Objectives 1, 3, and 7 of Cycle I and objective 3 of Cycle II are aligned to the psychomotor curriculum. Psychomotricity is based on scientific rationality and is in line with the conception of human movement as motor action. It is concerned with the act of learning, arising from the process of unbalancing the structures of action. The so-called education through movement promotes the development of cognitive, affective, and psychomotor behaviors. Due to its biologicist contribution with a neurobehavioral focus, this curriculum understands PE as a discipline that goes beyond the biological limits of body performance and includes abilities of psychological origin, to produce a balanced subject with the possibility of school success (^{LE BOULCH, 1983}).

During the 1980s, anchored in Jean Le Boulch’s psychokinetic method, several works, such as those by ^{Negrine (1983)}, ^{Melo (1989)}, and ^{Freire (1989)}, among many others, pointed out to the area that the goal of PE would be to develop psychomotor functions. ^{Freire (1989)}, who also contributed to the spread of Jean Piaget’s psychogenetic theory in the area of Physical Education, when discussing the social function of Physical Education, considers the education of movement, through movement, and for movement as a way to promote a whole body education. This way of thinking and developing the PE curriculum gained strength by proposing to overcome the paradigm of physical-sports aptitude, considered to be in line with the previous authoritarian governments, and suggesting games and the construction of alternative pedagogical materials, favoring the game as a pedagogical resource, to benefit the motor, cognitive, and affective development of the students. In spite of the criticism made to this proposal because of the lack of specificity for PE since the late 1980s, the DCC makes us believe that it did not have an impact on the municipality’s PE.

The developmental curriculum is present in objective 6 of Cycle I and in objective 5 of Cycle II. In it, movements are of great biological, psychological, social, cultural, and evolutionary importance, and that is why they are taken as the main means and end of physical education, because it is from them that humans interact with the environment, reach their goals, and satisfy their needs. Moreover, it is from the movement that individuals relate with others, learn about themselves, who they are, what they are capable of doing, and also learn about the social environment in which they live (^{TANI, 1988}).

This biopsychosocial perspective emphasizes the organization of the teaching content throughout the curriculum based on the phases of human development and on the characteristics of motor behavior, anchored in the learning of the cognitive and affective-social areas. Because of this, as a foundation that supports the elaboration of the teaching activities, a taxonomy for motor development was widely adopted, that is, the school curriculum takes as its main reference the hierarchical classification of the movements of human beings during their life cycle, from the prenatal phase to the specialized motor phase.

The developmental curriculum also understands human movement as motor action; however, its specificity is movement education, which occurs through the development of motor skills, aiming at the acquisition of the highest level of these skills, that is, specialized movement, for the subject’s personal use in leisure and specific work activities. It gained relevance in the field because it was believed that motor development would bring benefits to the other domains of behavior.

The psychomotor and developmental curriculum proposals made use of pedagogical discourses in vogue at the time, which aimed at transforming the exclusionary character of education and physical education (marked by sports competitiveness) to universal purposes in terms of respect for each subject’s behavioral modes and learning times, denoting a pedagogical practice concerned with the inclusion of everyone in the learning process. It is worth pointing out that the model of the sports curriculum tried to adapt to these theoretical references, incorporating their assumptions for the teaching of sports, producing a pedagogical sports discourse. Not by chance, we observe in several official documents and publications in the area the presence of objectives aiming at the improvement of psychomotor functions or progress in the development phases through sport, confounding educational purposes. The meritocratic objectives that characterized the sports curriculum, in fact, were camouflaged by the reference to perceptual and motor purposes (^{NEIRA; NUNES, 2009}).

This alignment is notorious, for, by presenting the same scientific basis, both the psychomotor and the developmental curriculum are inserted in the domain of cognitive and motor skills, strengthening the training aligned to neoliberalism. As ^{Foucault (2008a)} explained, competencies constitute human capital, that is, they can be transformed into income for the worker. This is how the interface between neoliberalism and education is established. Education, in this view, works as an investment, which both allows the worker’s productivity to increase – affecting the possibility of maximizing income throughout life – and enhances the market and the State for which the subject works.

If human movement can also be understood as energy production, the DCC present objectives 2, 8, and 9 of Cycle I; objectives 2, 4, and 6 of Cycle II; and objectives 2, 4, and 5 of the final years and adult education aligned to the PE curriculum with a focus on health (^{GUEDES, 1999}). This approach gained strength with the rise of the neoliberal art of government, expanding the notion of “active life” produced by economically and socially privileged sectors. In it, the need for self-care is emphasized. Not being healthy is more than being irresponsible, it is synonymous with being unproductive and costly to the State. The notion of active life associated with the notion of quality of life imposes new disciplinary technologies that mobilize new regulatory practices. In other words, by aiming at health promotion, this curriculum proposal inserts its subjects in the neoliberal rationality, teaching knowledge/techniques that promote responsibility, self-worth, and performance. In these terms, such objectives attribute and place the source of efficiency in the subject itself.

^{César and Duarte (2009)} explain that the thin body began to take up a large space in school concerns. In fact, health has never ceased to be on schools’ agenda, since the actions of measuring and weighing the bodies constituted the hygienic pedagogies of the beginning of the last century and are observed until today. The practices of government of healthy bodies become the central theme of the new body pedagogy, which takes the lead in contemporary school as a neoliberal biopolitical technique, aiming at the production of self-enterprising subjects (^{CÉSAR; DUARTE, 2009}). Not surprisingly, most of the objectives of DCC are of this order and are in all cycles.

The objectives that direct towards a critical formation are objectives 3 and 6 of the final years and adult education, although objectives 7 and 8 of Cycle II are often seen as such. These are in line with the objectives announced in the work Metodologia do ensino de educação física [Methodology for physical education teaching] (^{SOARES et al., 1992}), which marks the critical-superior curriculum of the area. This work is based on the organization of the curriculum by schooling cycles. In the first cycle (first grades of elementary school), the organization of the identification of the data from reality is proposed; in the second cycle (fourth to sixth grade), the initiation to the systematization of knowledge; in the third cycle (seventh to eighth grade), the expansion of the systematization of knowledge; and, in the fourth cycle (high school), the deepening of the systematization of knowledge. Despite being divided into cycles, the DCC do not follow the proposal by the Coletivo de Autores regarding curricular principles in dealing with knowledge, minimizing any attempt at a critical formation, which indicates recontextualization.

Highlighted for the first time in a curricular program of the Pernambuco State Secretariat of Education, it was in this work that the expression body culture gained evidence, contributing for the conceptual notion to be identified as an object of study of physical education. The term has gained space and, at the same time as it has spread across the field, it has weakened its political character because of the several processes of recontextualization it has undergone. As a result, it was appropriated in different ways by teachers. ^{Gramorelli and Neira (2017)} indicate that several official proposals from Brazilian states helped consolidate this process. The DCC are just another one that uses it, hybridizing it with technical aspects and minimizing the political character of the term.

These goals announce the understanding of distinct objects of knowledge, which produce divergent objectives. Such as the treatment of the object, the objectives reinforce the need for continued education in the same terms announced, reinforcing knowledge as merchandise and teacher incapacity. This implies the need to increase earnings to acquire knowledge, expanding the human capital of the teacher, that is, an effort has to be made for self-investment.

The announced effect, self-investment, reinforces the thesis of ^{Ball (2002)}, for whom neoliberalism has produced profound changes in the relationship between workers and between them and their work. It posits that, in these times, the commitment of the professional service performed is now evaluated by the demands of performativity, subordinating it to them. ^{Foucault (2008a)} states that neoliberalism is an art of government, which both produces a technology of the self, by which subjects conduct themselves, self-govern themselves, and produces subtle forms of government of others, of the population. For the French philosopher, neoliberalism is based on a social market economy that has expanded economic analyses to the entire social fabric, propagating everything in economic terms to traditionally non-economic social behaviors (p. 337). For Foucault, in this process, one must consider that what once could be understood as expenditure, neoliberalism has converted into investment. The goal is to turn individuals into subject-micro-enterprises and to commercialize all human relationships, in any time and place. By affirming that neoliberal political rationality bets on the institution of a competitive dynamic, Foucault distances himself from current interpretations that take as their main focus the consumer (commodity) society and, as a result, a society of the spectacle, of simulacra. The commodification of knowledge is preceded by competitiveness and performativity, and these are the political technologies that the State invests in to extend its strategies of social intervention and regulation.

In view of the conditions placed for the teacher to work, it is not hard to assume that the difficulty in reaching these goals causes teachers to self-assess their practice as insufficient and conduct themselves in search of ongoing training activities. As a result, the subject-teacher is formed according to current market requirements: it must constantly invest in its human capital, to guarantee performance and productivity that bring economic returns and contribute to society. This reinforces the position of the entrepreneurial subject and minimizes the possibilities of an ethical and collective being (^{BALL, 2002}).

What is at stake in the face of the epistemological and didactic inconsistencies of the DCC?

We learn from ^{Ball (2002)} that, in the established political order, States are forced to adjust domestic economies from the dynamics of the global economy. Curriculum policies are also targets of this condition. They are constantly negotiated, produced, and recontextualized. The DCC do not escape this, for, as we have noted, they present divergent views of subject, society, and physical education.

The DCC of PE carry within them the current curricular thought of PE, which contains ideas from other official texts, such as the National Curricular Guidelines (DCN) for undergraduate teaching courses, the DCNEF, the DCN for undergraduate courses in the health area, and the PCN. Besides these, one cannot disregard the ideas contained in the academic productions of physical education of greater circulation and in the various reinterpretations they undergo, which are carried out in the initial or continued training and on the school (^{NUNES; NEIRA, 2018}). By not defining the object of knowledge they deal with, the DCC present objectives from different epistemological perspectives, constituting an ambivalent document. Besides the epistemological aspects, this is reinforced by inoperativeness, because some of the objectives presented are not amenable to evaluation and others are unclear.

Based on the assumption of the curriculum as a dispositive for social regulation (^{POPKEWITZ, 1995}), what can be found in the DCC is the predominance of (neo)technicist aspects, which reinforce their hegemony and aim to produce a self-centered, efficient, competitive, and standardized subject, that is, a subject subjected to the imperatives of these times, which facilitates cultural homogenization.

On the other hand, as Guidelines, the confusion and incoherence of information produced can prompt games of self-analysis for teachers to question their practice, their training, and, perhaps, to feel the need to consume more training courses and personal overcoming goals, after all, performance is determined as the managerial power defines it. Without proper parameters, the DCC foster teacher insecurity and the importance of continuing education to account for the improbable. This indicative may favor another striking aspect of these times: the spread of clinical symptoms, such as the Burnout Syndrome, depression, and stress, which produce the corrosion of personality, demoralization, and desymbolization (^{DARDOT; LAVAL, 2016}), among other effects to be produced and diagnosed. The ambivalence of the DCC favors the consolidation of hegemonic values related to neoliberalism.

As a result of recontextualization, this production benefits the curtailment of transgressive actions and resistance to the processes of domination of class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. that gain space in social discussions. After all, it is easy to see that the DCC value individuation processes centered on the acquisition of skills and competencies, validates forms of movement based on standardized developmental stages, sustains and affirms a condition of health, and pays scant attention to social issues, not even mentioning goals for overcoming the identity problems that mark all of society.

In times of BNCC, we reiterate that it is from the production of knowledge in the area of curriculum policies that we are allowed to build tools that make it possible to criticize the forms of cultural imposition and the standardization of identities associated with neoliberalism. It is now time to investigate curriculum policies at the time of their formulation, as well as their implementation policies, up to their concretization on the school.