The work results from an ethnographic research carried out in a daycare center of the public school system of Florianópolis (SC). The data were analyzed considering the "didactic time" - recommended by the legislation -, structured in a routine comprising various moments: arrival, cleaning, feeding, sleep, playground, guided activity, departure. Inspired by issues from the Critical Theory of Society, the present text deals with the playground moments, considered as "privileged situations for education", both in the teachers' discourses and in the actions that distinguish these moments from the others, establishing a kind of opposition between "work time" and "free time". In such relation, apart from being regarded as periods to renew energies for the other activities, these moments offer an excuse to suspend the closer following up of activities by the teachers: the look of the grown up "will need" only to steer children clear of inadequate places or to avoid "exposed" wounds, shaping a group of socio-sanitary practices around the vital needs, and that contribute to eliminate deviances and differences in pursuit of pseudo-gratifications. The absence of a more careful approximation will also leave children to an ambiguous "spontaneity", subjected to the violence that produces scars, mainly on the body, and which promote the kind of education that privileges barbarism instead of opposing it. The results show also the presence of products for the consumption of leisure that inform beforehand the sequence of operations to be reproduced, requiring automated gestures and actions that stimulate the barrenness of imagination.
Early childhood education; Body education; Free time; Critical theory of society