INTRODUCTION

This text, written during the COVID-19 pandemic, takes on the scenario of one of the worst world epidemic occurrences ever, with repercussions that affected society in it most varied aspects, including health, education, social assistance and so on. Despite the capillarization of the epidemic in the social conjuncture, and of its far-reaching political implications, the intention of this text is to promote a reflection on the impact of the epidemic in educational processes. We aim to discuss the role played by education in this social context, especially at this moment of multiple challenges, which hints at aspects to the updated and re-formulated in the interface with Psychology.

Initially, it is important to locate some of the challenges that come along with the emergence of COVID-19 and which constitute our field of analysis. Because COVID-19 is caused by a corona vírus of elevated levels of infection, social distance was recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) in order to amplify physical isolation among people. Such restriction was a means to protect people from contamination, and the consequent spread of the disease. In this process, a series of social aspects appeared in an incontestable way as an indication of the intrinsically social dimension of the processes of psychological illness (^{Negreiros & Ferreira, 2021}).

For example, we can remember that a large portion of the population was unable to join social isolation due to socio-economic conditions and the precarious organization of labor relations in the country, while the ones who could stay in isolation had to face loss of income¹, with food insecurity, lack of conditions to take health precautions²; with the challenge of having to work, interact with family members and have some fun all at the same place, which the literature considers a determining psychological demand³; in addition to the need to adapt to new technologies in different contexts of everyday life.

Regarded in a general way, and we are particularly interest in the field of Education and adopted measures, the suspension of onsite classes at schools and universities was the main strategy, and it was followed worldwide (despite the resistance of Brazilian governmental instances). Despite the United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO, 2020), 186 countries closed down their learning institutions and almost 1.3 billion students ceased to commute to schools and universities. This aspect was intensely experienced in the everyday lives of educational institutions and it was discussed in research works that reiterated the impact of these measures on other institutional spaces such as the family environment and the work of caretakers, as well as the importance of the school space (and of education professionals) in the psychosocial experience of children and youngsters (^{Negreiros & Ferreira, 2021}).

This troublesome field provides an example of the transversal character of Education because educational organizations take on an array of institutional aspects that go beyond their concrete spaces, congregating childhoods, youths, and families in certain ways to live. It is an intrinsically political field, and we understand as political everything that engineers ways to live in the public space, in the polis (in the city, in collective space).

This interpretation, which finds resonances in the process indicated by ^{Rancière (2005}) as a sharing of the sensible, tells of certain sensibility regimes that are collectively constituted in social practices, in spaces, at times, in the comprehensions of the world, distributing a series of social functions into important organizations for the construction of life with others. These sharings of the sensible, in which viscerally political problems stand out, provide school with sui generis institutional relevance. School, as a space for sharing sensibilities, is an everyday testimonial of the social importance that education occupies in the production of forms of collective care. Regarding this perspective, we can understand that the experience in and of the pandemic makes us think how the construction (or lack of it) of caretaking strategies for individuals (a certain sensibility regime) happens with political implications.

On this aspect, in this text, we make two considerations that demonstrate the importance of thinking over the political implications of actions that were developed in this period: first, that the pandemic generated emergency situations and the transformations in the everyday life of schools are equivalent to “war plans”, distinct aspect of the creation of a so-called “new normal”.⁴ According to ^{Pais (2010}, p. 307), everyday life is “where everything comes to pass but nothing seems to happen”, and what happens during a pandemic are potentially traumatizing experiences whose descriptions as supposedly symmetrical with a new normality produces deleterious political implications. Second, that the implications of this crisis are responsible for psychosocial disturbances that might surpass the capacity for facing collective situations and that such repercussions differ in their levels of intensity and complexity, in accordance with the degree of vulnerability of the population, as indicated by data from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fundação Oswaldo Cruz [Fiocruz], 2020).

These aspects emphasize visceral proximities between Psychology and Education. It is a relation of partnership whose object if shared: the emancipation of individuals. The term emancipation proves important and polysemic in literature, sustaining a series of pertinent discussions that refer to authors such as Kant, Marx and Adorno (^{Ambrosini, 2012}). Most importantly, we are interested in the emancipation that is connected to Paulo Freire, who was attentive to Latin-American problems and observed the need for collective actions by individuals, transforming concrete existences and setting them free from oppression by means of education. According to Freire, emancipation is supported by an education that “turns oppression and its causes into the object of reflection for the oppressed ones, and the result will be the necessary engagement in the fight for its liberation” (Freire, 2005, p. 34).

In the aftermath of this discussion, which subscribes to the notion that these fields cannot be seen as disconnected from life in society, we can point at measures that are in alignment with this view of emancipation and its integration with the promotion of health. Recently, for example, Law no. 13.935 was established, on September 11, 2019 (Brasil, 2019), which regulates the availability of services of Psychology and Social Assistance in the basic network of education in the country. Such conquest confirms the relevance of actions that are effective in the promotion of integral health in the field of school education, thought without guarantee of approaching the whole complexity of this field.

Conceiving Psychology and Education as politically situated, we need to think of more organized strategies for the construction o a future that pays attention to the different forms of making life precarious, as well as actions to face emergency situations - which particularly interest the present study. In order to do it, we will approach some basic elements: the conception of education that sustains our argument, the perspective in which the school space is an environment of formation and, therefore, cannot dispense with experience as a fundamental element in an emancipating education.

SOME INITIAL REFLECTIONS ON POLITICAL TRANSVERSALITIES IN EDUCATION AND SCHOOL AS A FORMING EXPERIENCE

We take the perspective of Libâneo in order to announce what we understand as education. When the author names it science of education - because, in his opinion, there is an interface that determines that “educational practices do not take place away from social, political, cultural, and economic relations of society” (^{Lisita, 2007}, p. 513) -, he justifies that, in education, what is produced is human science. Education is understood as a multiple process, which takes place in different spaces where there are processes of teaching and learning and is directly related to culture and politics (^{Demo, 1989}), that is, it is potentially a field of action, of practice, and also, of criticism.

This discussion leads to an understanding that, as praxis, education is a social policy that is inseparable from the social issue (^{Behring & Boschetti, 2011}, ^{Faleiros, 2013}, ^{Pereira, 2011}, ^{Santos, 2013}). The social issue expresses the economic, political, and cultural inequalities of social classes, mediatized by disparities in social markers such as gender, ethnicity, race, and geopolitics, affecting large segments of civil society in the access to social assets. The structural dimension viscerally reaches the life of individuals in a fight for citizenship and for respect to human rights.

This process is full of conformism and rebelliousness, expressing the conscience and the fight for recognition of the rights of each individual and of social collectiveness (^{Iamamoto & Carvalho, 2008}). In view of this social asymmetry, social policies must be understood as fundamental for “the wellbeing of citizens”, because they intervene in the “gap produced by imbalances in the distribution in favor of capitalist accumulation and in detriment of the satisfaction of basic social needs, as well as the promotion of equality” (^{Oliveira & Duarte, 2005}, p. 283).

Regarding inequality as a social issue, education positions itself as social policy: an active process that produces and is produced, that affects and is affected, and that is co-responsible for the construction of a proposal for a better world based on an institutional reading that is ethically committed. This institutional reading regards education as a production field that has potential for action in the safeguarding of social rights connected to human needs from the perspective of amplified citizenship, so we can highlight two relevant aspects: 1) education does not limit itself to school activities, no matter how much of a privileged place it is from pedagogical production; 2) education as a social policy must play a primary role for the social development of a nation, thus based on a theoretical-methodological perspective, on social visions of the world, and on society projects that must not be compromised by partisan bias.

Regarding education at school, in particular, it is possible to argue for its importance for human development. A lot has been produced on the value of school, especially at times when it has been attacked with criticisms that reveal the lack of recognition of school as a forming process. To this field of discussion, ^{Arendt (2016}) added important matters, regarding school as responsible for promoting a connection between the public and the private for children, in a double effort to keep these spheres as singular spaces, and at the same time, mediate the transition from the private (family) to the public (the world and society).⁵ These aspects establish school as a place for experiences, with the function of forming matrix for social actors (^{Josso, 2002}), and that promotes constant productions (^{Paro, 2001}).

The concept of experience, in particular, needs to be understood in the context of education, because, according to ^{Dewey (2010}), both are not synchronized, and some experiences are downright mis-educational. To the author, “the belief that genuine education happens by means of experience, which does not mean that all experiences are genuine and equally educational” (2010, p. 14). According to Dewey (as mentioned in ^{Diehl et. al., 2016}), experience constitutes itself by fundamental principles of continuity and interaction. The first principle, of continuity of experience, considers that “all experience is based on something that already existed in previous experiences and modifies itself” (p. 26), that is, new experiences are based on what individuals have inherited. The second one, the principle of interaction, happens by means of the transaction between individual, objects, and other people.

Naturally, different authors dedicated themselves to the notion of experience, demonstrating their articulations in the production of lives. To ^{Pais (2010}), for example, experience is the fundamental basis for the actual recognition that leads to knowing why something happens; ^{Larrosa Bondía (2002}, p. 05) regards it as “something that passes”, something that happens to those who go through a transforming situation, and Certeau defines it at “something that is given to us each day (or that is our share), presses us day after day, and oppresses us because there is oppression in the present” (2008, p. 31). These conceptions subscribe to a common presupposition that experience takes time, existence and sense, which indicates that the route to its production happens by means of singular practices (an aspect that we could regard as potentially counter-hegemonic and connected to forms of emancipatory experience).

In a triangulation of the presented concepts, it is possible to defend that, at school, there is a singular type of experience (potentially emancipatory), which is the school experience, which is characterized by the intentionality that is present in the pedagogical practice of educators. That is, the specificity of the school experience consists of its purpose to promote processes for teaching and learning that organize themselves by means of the educators’ mediation.

In the school experience, different process of teaching and learning organize themselves and, in this daily effort, individuals produce knowledge of themselves, on others and on the world - that is, we are talking about the production of conditions for the constitution of good experiences: experiences that can have arid aspects, such as the pandemic, but that harbor a potential for emancipation. In this discussion conjuncture, which conceives experience as an educational force and that regards school as a privileged space for experience, thinking of school in an emergency context leads us to a certain problems and possibilities - that concern, most importantly, Psychology.

SCHOOL IN THE CONTEXT OF EMERGENCY: CONTRIBUTIONS BY PSYCHOLOGY

We can consider that the discussion on experience, quite relevant to this context, connects Education and Psychology like a bridge. Anyway, there is a genealogic relation in the areas that constitutes a greater field for dialogue and similar interests (conceptual and pragmatic). It is even possible to consider that this relation, “especially in its mediations with the theories of knowledge, is something that follows the very history of human thought and constitutes itself as a complex and vast study” (^{Antunes, 2008}, p. 469).

In the current scenario, such affinity realizes itself by contemplating contributions by Educational Psychology as well as School Psychology. By concept, both are intrinsically related though not identical. Educational Psychology can be considered a branch of psychology and is equipped with a corpus of knowledges referring to psychological phenomenon that constitute the educational process, based on ontological, epistemological, methodological, and ethical conceptions. On the other hand, School psychology constitutes itself as a field of professional practice referring to the schooling process, whose object is the school and the relations that it establishes. As an area of practice, School Psychology is based on the knowledges produced by Education Psychology as well as by other areas of knowledge (^{Antunes, 2008}).

In view of the pandemic conjuncture, it is important to highlight how the types of Psychology could collaborate in this process of production of emancipatory experiences in and of school practices. Educational and School Psychology demonstrated a great potential to act in educational contexts, whether at spaces for discussions (reformulation) of Brazilian Education, in the realm of proposition of strategies and plans (macro context that does not disconnect itself from the creation of healthy institutional environments), or in the realm of promotion, prevention and intervention with recommendations for mental health regarding the challenges of school life (micro context in which singular forms of school experience can be produced in a confluence of adequate governance policies and implied work, singular forms of school experience).

It is important to emphasize that the forms of action in Psychology (Educational and School) in educational contexts, although they provide a response to some of the new challenges of the pandemic, have to deal with aspects that already existed in the serious crises that Education was going through in the country. Since March 2020, starting point of the disease in the national territory, different analytical aspects got more intense. Such aspects included the ones concerning the relation between school and school community (problems that historically affected more populations than the very pandemic, but overtly strategic regarding the context of COVID-19) and the magnitude of the psychosocial impacts of the pandemic (in the specificity of an abrupt and violent social change). Understanding the conjunction of elements such as these is fundamental for the elaboration of strategies in Psychology in the educational context and the affirmation of the legitimacy of its practice in the emergency scenario.

An example that fits these dimensions, among others, was the suspension of onsite classes. Despite the awareness that the difficulties of Brazilian education did not limit themselves to the suspension of classes, this was a significant fact, because such alternative measures obtained by the education networks were merely immediate responses to immediate problems. Three issues are important concerning this aspect: the first one is that, despite the orientation towards the possibility of remote education, it is necessary to remind everyone that Elementary Education in Brazil does not have this mode as a regulated practice; the second one is that the possibility of remote education exposed the inequalities that plagued the Brazilian population and amplified the lenses over social asymmetries. A clear evidence of this aspect is that most of the education organizations in the private network made the transition to remote classes, using digital platforms, video lessons, online activities and takeaway, while inviting teachers, students and family members to experience a new routine. Meanwhile, in the public network, there was a real struggle in a game of attempts and failures as schools had to face the various vulnerabilities that followed this system; the third issue is that, by articulating previous aspects, new meaning is given to numerous impacts produced by the remote education experience or the interruption of the academic term, which was recurrent in other organizations.

In the aftermath of this discussion, we can see that transversal demands underlying the trajectories of Psychology professional in educational organizations: effectively learning how to use the new technological tools; provide assistance in the online format; handling the intense use of social networks and message apps; follow the technical teamwork, which also had to go through re-invention and adapt to the demands of remote activities. In addition to providing assistance to students, the scenario was demanding and complex: the presence of conflict in the home environment, even in the threat to unemployment and economic precariousness; the fear of infection and social distance (and in the aftermath of this experience, feelings of irritability, impatience and boredom); learning difficulties and low engagement to educational activities (^{Matioli & Walter, 2021}).

Significant when we consider such change in the education process, these elements refer to the complex of aspects that take place in the school everyday life. According to ^{Pais (1993}, p.108), it is in the trajectories of everyday life, which “sometimes has an ambiguous meaning that is characteristic of what suddenly installs itself in life, that the social reveals itself. The COVID-19 pandemic blended the public and the private at home, led to the addition of more chores and generated conflicts that resulted in situations of physical and mental exhaustion, according to studies in the field of Psychology (^{Negreiros & Ferreira, 2021}; ^{Souza, 2022}). At schools, in particular, everyday life changed so much that it became necessary to reinvent virtually everything before we could even think of returning to onsite classes, very often using theoretical-conceptual fundaments of psychology in order to handle psychological aspects related to the serious pandemic crisis.

Examples like this remind us of the need for a Psychology that offers strong theoretical mediations that support the fundaments of education and the educational practice, in articulation with expressions of social nature, as well as strategies of prompt intervention with school communities in emergency scenarios. Thus, the Psychology praxis will be able to provide assistance to schools at moments when administrators, teachers, children, and family members find themselves even more vulnerable than in the structural phenomena of education.

This way of thinking the Psychology praxis and its possible contributions to education involves a process of constant analysis of implication. If, as we have mentioned before, it is in everyday life that we will find expressions of social problems that are important for the relevance of our study, it becomes necessary to look within and make a list of the implications of our theory/practice. Concerning this movement, we recommend making a list of problems related to a statement that is widely known by Psychololy professionals during the period of pandemic isolation: the “new normal”. What does it mean to describe a “new normal” as a possible statement in an emergency context? What does this concept make visible and/or what does it paralyze?

This phrase became commonplace during the pandemic, and it was used as jargon in advertising campaigns, content for newspapers and magazines, info material at universities and schools, in the discourse of psychological intervention at different organizations, that is, spreading with rapidity and efficiency. A whole set of perspectives and propositions was included in this “new normal”, which was used as a means to promote awareness of matters of hygiene and healthy habits, or demands for a certain very questionable “resilience” in individuals. We are especially interested in the proposals (especially by private institutions) to rethink education processes, increasing the interface with online modes and individualized teaching.

It is important to remember that the advocation of individualizing formation strategies (whether in the domestic context or, for adults, in remote teaching modalities) reiterated a series of criticisms to school (especially public school and its educators) that have become more and more intense since the beginning of the 21^st century (^{Nóvoa & Alvim, 2021}). This aspect is important because it was possible to observe movements that demanded that educational activities moved towards these formats - at a political moment in Brazil in which contact with differences was intensely underrated. The private teaching strategies at home, for many children and individually for adults, seemed to promote at the same time little contact with differences and a pedagogical format that was suitable to a modern life that was suffocated by precarious labor logics. No wonder there was an increase in the number of companies that are interested in this field with considerable investment by global industries on digital technologies for education.

Although it is not possible or desirable to dispense with digital technologies in educational processes, the issue at hand transcends technological matters. We question, then, the purpose of the technology that is used and where it is located in the social tissue at this moment. In the end: emancipation or performance? In this discussion, the analysis of the implication of the educational processes (quite often qualified as “new”) needs to take a distance from the technological discussion, especially regarding the risk of a symbiosis between these spheres simply for the benefit of the maintenance of a consumers’ market and an individualistic, productivist education.

^{Nóvoa and Alvim (2021}), specifically discussing the position of teachers in this conjuncture sustain that, before we can think of a new position regarding contemporary education, we need to eradicate three illusions: one, “education is everywhere and at all times” and happens “naturally” especially in “familiar and virtual” environments; two, “school is dead as a physical environment”, and now is the time to rely on “distance” strategies and with “learning facilitators”; three, pedagogy as a specialized knowledge for teachers will be replaced by technologies. According to the authors, regarding these illusions, it is necessary to emphasize the importance of the role played by teachers: in the construction of a common public space for education, in the creation of school environments and in the production of a “pedagogy of connection” (Nóvoa & Alvim, 2021).

These claims, for a pedagogy that promotes experience and singularity, contrast with the “new normal”. After all, aren’t some new uses of the phrase “new normal” against the process of emancipatory experience? Although it is not a new process, this “new normal” certainly proved propelled by the emergence of Covid-19, emphasizing the potency and the capillarization of the enterprising discourse and of capitalist rationality.

Nóvoa and Alvim ask the following question, although Covid-19 closed down schools, “was it able to bring the global education industry, the pedagogical consumerism, education privatization, and the discourse of education urgency to a halt?” (2021, p.06). to this question, we may add the following, how and from what perspective can Psychology help in the process of education emancipation?

Even the digital world and its possibilities need professionals that fight against the impoverishment of the social experience (less contact with difference) and for the sake of different forms of knowing and making the world (intrinsically ethical and political problems). It is also a concern of Psychology professionals. There comes a time in which the practice of Psychology in the school spaces implies the abandonment of the clinical-therapeutic model for the sake of the creation of singularity and of collective care. The pandemic, as social occurrence indicates that we need to eradicate the clinical-therapeutic model so we can act on the social demands that are emergent and urgent at schools.

Under the guise of final considerations

Education and school (as policies and spaces for social emancipation) have been the target of the vulnerability virus. According to ^{Santos (2020}, p. 16) in “The Cruel Pedagogy of the Virus”, “any quarantine is always discriminatory by nature” and, although the author mentions some groups that are considered as more vulnerable in the situation (women, informal and autonomous workers, homeless, or people who are temporarily living in the streets, immigrants and residents of the suburbs, people with disabilities and the elderly), in addition to the school community, for considering the importance of school in the development of people and also the function of social protection that it serves.

Considering that the relation between Psychology and Education is historically implied and, despite some distortions of the specificity of this knowing/doing at school, which has been often mistaken by the observation of purely behavioral matters or reduced to the identification and isolation of learning problems, it is considered that Psychology served, in Education at this moment, an outstanding function. This conjuncture will have to be analyzed and understood both by Education and by Psychology so that together they can be powerful actors in the elaboration of emergency actions, in addition to the planning of the re-structuring of schools after the pandemic. The political transversalities in and of education are the guarantee of its importance for continuity and for change in society.

In this sense, the need for the presence of a School Psychology that associates personal readings to the social context is demonstrated. It is an area that needs to develop the constitution of spaces for qualified listening and for collective projects that effectively cast individuals as protagonists. Thus, the realization of studies that articulate these demands (singular and professional necessities of students and professionals, but also of interventions for the institutional strengthening) are urgent. False solutions for education, associated to contemporary neoliberal logic and often under the title “new normal” actually point at the danger of individualizing problems and decontextualizing educational processes.

Practicing Psychology means practicing politics, and the role played by professionals in the area includes working in consonance with perspectives in and of the safeguarding of social rights. During and after the pandemic, the different Psychologies stood out for their theoretical fundaments and concepts and took on spaces for protagonism regarding their analytical and interventive objects. As transversal, it is possible to highlight the perception that the greatest challenge is the confrontation against expressions of social nature that were amplified by the pandemic. Confronting and overcoming the crisis are priorities like the need to construct quality education that is significant in the current context and that are systematically organized and re-structured for the future. In order to do so, we need teamwork to write a new chapter in the history of the relations between Education and Psychology.