The black child and the documents published by the Ministry of Education in the period from 1960 to 2000

Abstract

This article is the result of an investigation that worked with documents published by the Ministry of Education (MEC) between 1960 and 2000, with the objective of identifying the place of the black child in these official documents destined to guide preschool education in Brazil. By showing the invisibility of ethnic-racial relations in these official documents for almost four decades, the study contributes to recognize that scientific productions about childhood and early childhood education in the historical context of Brazilian education are necessary theoretical-methodological assumptions to include racial diversity in national policies of child education. Theoretical research of the documentary analysis type was developed based on a set of MEC publications in the mentioned period, whose data were grouped into themes to show the dynamics of preschool education between 1960 and 1980, later called early childhood education, in the 1990s. In both contexts, it is observed that, for decades, the denial of black child was explicit in the documents, a situation that only ended in 1997, with the first national publication addressed to the day care center.