The Production of the Subject with High Abilities in Mathematics and School Inclusion in Contemporary Education

Abstract

Understanding high abilities in Mathematics as practices that amidst power-knowledge relations identify, compare, and classify the student-subjects as persons with high abilities, this article aims to discuss how power-language games produce these subject-forms in contemporary school. Our analytical-conceptual production was based on the thoughts of M. Foucault and related authors in relation to language, discursive practices, power relations, and forms of government. Following these studies, the inclusive educational policy is analyzed, emphasizing its effects on how conducts and performances are handled in the context of neoliberalism, as well as its effects on contemporary school in Brazil. Thus, high abilities constitute no mere update of nomenclature or adjustment of vocabulary, but refer to a game of power and classification that produces, in the school space, the student-subject with high abilities based on norms, processes, and purposes related to behavior and performance.