BETWEEN THE TARGET AND THE SUBJECT: DIGITAL PLATFORMS, SPECIAL EDUCATION STUDENTS AND THE LIMITS OF STANDARDIZATION IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Abstract

This essay examines the tensions between the expansion of digital platforms in Brazilian public basic education and the inclusive school's commitment to students who are the target audience of Special Education. The organizing question is: what happens when the design of a digital tool presupposes a student who does not correspond to the actual diversity of classrooms? The reflection stems from management experience in one municipal and one state school in São Paulo and articulates three axes of analysis: accessibility understood as a pedagogical rather than merely technical condition, teacher mediation as intellectual work that reconstructs what the platform standardizes, and the formulation of digital policies that incorporate learner variability from the design stage onward. The argument sustained is that algorithmic standardization of learning pathways produces a specific form of exclusion, distinct from the absence of connectivity or equipment, which appears when the student accesses the platform but finds no pathways compatible with their ways of learning, communicating and responding. It concludes that digital inclusion does not follow from the presence of technology, but from the conceptions of the subject inscribed in its design.