O MENINO CONECTIVO

A INFÂNCIA COMO ONTOLOGIA DO SER SOCIAL EM PAULO FREIRE1

Abstract

The present work examines Paulo Freire’s modus operandi, as an intellectual and educator, based on the concept of “connective child”, a self-describing expression of the Brazilian thinker. This idea, which also constitutes an existential metaphor, is discussed from the categories of childhood and connectivity, the basis by which one seeks to explain, in the life and work of the Brazilian author, a set of 1 Este texto foi publicado, originalmente, na obra: SILVA, Marta Regina da; MAFRA, Jason Fer‑reira. Paulo Freire e a educação das crianças. São Paulo, BT Acadêmico: 2020. ethical-moral values (axiology), a way of conceiving and structuring knowledge (epistemology) and a way of intervening in the educational and social reality (praxis). For this, books, articles, interviews and testimonies of the author were taken as sources of research, as well as works and testimonies about him, in the latter case, particularly from people who lived with the thinker. The examination of this phenomenon has shown that the metaphor of the “connective child” is expressed in a coherent way in the educator’s life and work. Freire materialized the sense of childhood not as an age group, but as an existential condition marked by a set of ontological categories, in which curiosity, incompleteness and hope stand out, with connectivity being an epistemological condition, which made it transit by different knowledge, popular and academic, establishing a new paradigm in the field of education and beyond.