The tragic in the school scene and the medicalization as denouement

Abstract

The paper is aimed at discussing a phenomenon that has expanded in the last decade in the school scenario: the medicalization of the learning symptom as a denouement for the suffering that engenders it – both for the student and the teachers and families. As a method, this writing starts from a resumption of the classic tragedy to highlight elements that make it possible to compose different scenarios that indicate possible unfoldings for the encounter with the unsolvable dimension of the (ex)sistence. The writing reflect upon the consequences of this encounter for the relationship established among the school actors involved in the educational praxis. Resuming the figure of deus ex machina, the work indicates that, many times, medicalization enters the school scene as an external element that discontinues the necessary conditions for a consideration of the inherent impossible in educating, as the opening to an invention that mobilizes the elements internal to the scene in the construction of a way out from the unease. When the denouement of an impasse is thought from the perspective of the unsolvable that the language inscribes in the ordinary life, the solutions for the school conflicts are ultimately invented in the relationships between the subjects.