Trabalho infantil no cultivo do tabaco e educação escolar: a realidade do Município de Prudentópolis – PR

Abstract

This study aims to unveil the relationship between the schooling process and child labor in tobacco production in Prudentópolis, Paraná, Brazil. Anchored in historical and dialectical materialism, it was sought to analyze as many determinations as possible on the investigated issue, having as a research route the bibliographic and documentary study, as well as the analysis of empirical data of the reality. Interviews were conducted with education professionals and rural workers and the collection of drawings and texts of children residing in tobacco farming communities. In this way, the main causes of child labor and their effects on the schooling process are identified; the public policies that aim to confront child labor present in the Brazilian reality are described; and, finally, the reality of child labor in tobacco production and its relationship with schooling in the municipality under investigation is analyzed. The work is organized in three chapters, entitled: Child labor in the context of capitalist society and its implications in the schooling process; The foundations of the State and its relations with public policies to confront child labor in the Brazilian context; Child labor in tobacco production and school education: analysis of the reality. In general, the research indicates that: there is a distance between legal and normative provisions and the empirical reality; the emphasis given by normative and political documents to the educational dimension obscures the exploitation relations of the child labor force that is perpetuated in the Brazilian reality, and especially in the investigated reality; early insertion in the world of work has negative effects on both the physical and educational development of children; policies aimed at combating child-juvenile labor are inefficient, since they are not able to interfere with the structure of the capitalist society. Under these limitations, there is currently a system of ‘deprotection’ and denial of social rights, and the school, although a strong ally in the fight against child-juvenile labor, is not able to suppress this problem, since its origin is consubstantially rooted in the contradictory relations that lead tobacco growers to subservience to capital.