A educação é espaço de disputa, tanto como signo, quanto como espaço formal. Este ensaio visa desenvolver algumas questões contemporâneas que impactam diretamente o campo educacional e, portanto, a escola. Tais questões são: o regime político-econômico neoliberal que determina até mesmo os currículos e práticas, a perda de experiência a qual se manifesta também nas instituições de ensino e, por fim, o documento oficial que surge como reflexo do tempo presente, a Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC) enquanto expressão desse regime atual. A observação desses três elementos demonstra como estão profundamente imbricados e se retroalimentam. Com isso, o objetivo deste estudo é analisar em que medida a experiência formativa apresentada na BNCC, em adequação ao neoliberalismo, acarreta uma perda à formação e à experiência. A análise documental ocorreu a partir da BNCC por meio de alguns aportes teóricos em especial Larrosa (2002), Libâneo (2018), Freitas (2014), Benjamin (2017) e Adorno (2000). Constata-se que, nos moldes de um ensino direcionado à instrumentalização e à preparação para o mercado de trabalho, por vezes, não há espaço para a formação integral do sujeito, ou mesmo para o desenvolvimento de experiências, uma vez que o objetivo e a percepção de tempo nesse sistema impossibilitam práticas formativas que fujam do viés utilitário. Repensar a educação e estudar criticamente os documentos oficiais são tarefas necessárias para que a experiência formativa não atue cada vez mais como mera adequação ao mundo, e sim opere formativamente, isto é, a contrapelo de um regime acachapante.

Palavras-chave: Educação; BNCC; Neoliberalismo; Experiência.

ABSTRACT

Education is a site of dispute, both as a signifier and as a formal space. This essay aims to develop some contemporary issues that directly impact the educational field and, therefore, the school. These issues are: the neoliberal political-economic regime that determines even curricula and practices; the loss of experience, which also manifests itself in educational institutions; and, finally, the official document that emerges as a reflection of the present time, the Brazilian National Common Curricular Base (Base Nacional Comum Curricular – BNCC) as an expression of this current regime. The observation of these three elements demonstrates how they are deeply intertwined and mutually reinforcing. Thus, the objective of this study is to analyze to what extent the formative experience presented in the BNCC, in alignment with neoliberalism, results in a loss to formation and to experience. The documentary analysis was carried out based on the BNCC, drawing on theoretical contributions, especially Larrosa (2002), Libâneo (2018), Freitas (2014), Benjamin (2017), and Adorno (2000). It is observed that, within the framework of an education oriented toward instrumentalization and preparation for the labor market, there is often no space for the integral formation of the subject, or even for the development of experiences, since the objective and the perception of time within this system preclude formative practices that deviate from a utilitarian bias. Rethinking education and critically examining official documents are necessary tasks so that formative experience does not increasingly operate as mere adaptation to the world, but rather functions in a genuinely formative way, that is, against the grain of an overwhelming regime.

Keywords: Education; BNCC; Neoliberalism; Experience.

RESUMEN

La educación es un espacio de disputa, tanto como signo como espacio formal. Este ensayo pretende desarrollar algunas cuestiones contemporáneas que impactan directamente en el ámbito educativo y, por tanto, en la escuela. Tales temas son: el régimen político-económico neoliberal que determina currículos y prácticas, la pérdida de experiencia que también se manifiesta en las instituciones educativas y, finalmente, el documento oficial que aparece como reflejo de la actualidad, la Base Nacional Curricular Común (BNCC) como expresión de este régimen actual. La observación de estos tres elementos demuestra cómo están profundamente entrelazados y se retroalimentan mutuamente. Por tanto, el objetivo de este estudio es analizar en qué medida la experiencia formativa expresada en el BNCC, en adaptación al neoliberalismo, conduce a una pérdida de formación y experiencia. El análisis documental se realizó a partir de algunos aportes teóricos, especialmente Larrosa (2002), Libâneo (2018), Freitas (2014), Benjamin (2017) y Adorno (2000). Parece que, en las modalidades de enseñanza orientada a la instrumentalización y preparación para el mercado laboral, en ocasiones no hay espacio para la formación integral del sujeto, ni siquiera para el desarrollo de experiencias, ya que el objetivo y la percepción del tiempo en este sistema imposibilitan prácticas de formación que escapen al sesgo utilitarista. Repensar la educación y estudiar críticamente los documentos oficiales son tareas necesarias para que la experiencia formativa no actúe cada vez más como una mera adaptación al mundo, sino que opere formativamente, es decir, a contrapelo de un régimen abrumador.

Palabras clave: Educación; BNCC; Neoliberalismo; Experiencia.

INTRODUCTION

Through this text, we propose a dialogue on the (im)possibility of the integral formation of subjects within a context marked by strictly neoliberal ambitions, in which the treatment of education is determined by the market value of knowledge production and, therefore, culminates in the loss of experience within the school space. The reflection will be carried out based on one of the guiding documents of education in the Brazilian context: the National Common Curricular Base (Base Nacional Comum Curricular – BNCC)[I]. The choice of this document for the proposed analysis and reflection stems from the authors’ concerns regarding the object, but also from the need to deepen the interaction among the themes of education, neoliberalism, and experience based on it. This text results from qualitative, bibliographic, and documentary research, which, in turn, was conducted through a dialogical analysis. We understand that every utterance is “permeated with echoes and responses of other utterances with which it is linked within a common sphere of verbal communication” (Bakhtin, 2003, p. 317). Dialogical analysis is grounded in the understanding that there is no separation and, therefore, no neutrality between researchers and the object, insofar as the construction of knowledge occurs through an interactive process among the voices that constitute both. It is thus necessary to outline part of the theoretical path undertaken as an attempt to approach the concerns that will be raised throughout this text.

When discussing the teaching of reading, in one of his texts, Britto (2015), a scholar of education and language, argues that reading is a transitive verb, since, when considering its value or even its contribution to the formation of the subject, we must take into account the ways in which this reading occurs, the reflections derived from it, as well as the very object through which it takes place. We intend to extend this concept to what we understand as education. It is evident that the appropriation of the term occurs daily, whether by private or governmental institutions, encompassing conceptions of human beings and society anchored in distinct formative projects. Libâneo and Silva (2020) discuss educational purposes and identify three of them: results-oriented education; education for diversity; and education as the development of human capacities in articulation with diversity. In each of these conceptions, distinct views of human beings and society can be discerned. However, we should not be misled, as these conceptions do not appear in isolation in one or another historical moment, if considered diachronically, nor in one or another educational institution, in a synchronic analysis.

Education has historically been a space of struggles and conflicts in defense of one or another project of society. However, some projects tend to be masked and reintroduced through the adoption of so-called contemporary slogans. This is the case of education oriented toward the development of competencies and skills, which we understand as part of what Evangelista and Seki (2017, p. 22–23) describe as a “set of strategies adopted by agencies and centers of power to rationalize educational systems and adjust educational policies to the economic pressures of international agencies”. Within this context emerges the document on which we intend to focus in this reflection: the National Common Curricular Base. In this sense, the dialogue proposed here seeks to answer to what extent the formative experience expressed in the BNCC, in alignment with neoliberalism, leads to the loss of the integral formation of subjects.

The social relevance of this research is grounded in two aspects: first, its investigative character regarding human formation in contemporary formal education; second, its analysis and reflection on key educational concepts within the document that currently serves as the primary guide for the organization of basic education curricula in Brazil. In contrast, its scientific relevance is demonstrated by the analysis of the lack of interrelation and development of the concepts applied in the BNCC, which generates discursive inconsistencies. Furthermore, with regard to neoliberalism, much has been discussed about how it impacts processes of school management and organization, particularly affecting democratic management — yet little has been examined concerning how it conceptually weakens reflections on education within the BNCC.

The dialogue presented in this text is organized according to the themes proposed for discussion. Thus, first, the reader will encounter a brief reflection on the influences of neoliberalism on education, followed by a contextualization of the concept of experience adopted in this study and its consequent loss under neoliberal assumptions. The section corresponding to the analysis and reflection on the BNCC, in turn, appears prior to the final considerations.

NEOLIBERALISM AND EDUCATION

At this point, it is necessary to reflect on the concept of neoliberalism and its influence on the erasure of experience in the educational environment, a factor that results in a fragmented formation of subjects. Libâneo (2018), in his text “Neoliberal educational policies and schools: a restricted and restrictive quality of education (Políticas educacionais neoliberais e escolas: uma qualidade de educação restrita e restritiva)”, addresses the influences of liberal policies on education, showing that economic logic has greatly contributed to a fragmented formation of subjects aimed solely at the labor market. In this context, as researchers and advocates of the implementation of an education that genuinely concerns itself with the integral formation of subjects, we must remain attentive to the objectives behind certain educational plans which, at times, appear unassuming precisely because they do not explicitly reveal their interconnection with a market-oriented project of society. The author further contributes to our reflection by presenting a brief historical and political contextualization of the conception of quality and education in Brazil, reaffirming the infeasibility of dissociating a given conception of quality from the objectives that sustain it. From a restricted view of education, it is not possible to uphold a notion of quality that recognizes the relevance of the integral formation of subjects.

However, before focusing on the effects of neoliberalism on education, it is worth attempting to minimally clarify what this term means. To some extent, the word is almost self-explanatory, as it would be a new form of liberalism, but in what way does it differ from the former? In particular, we can highlight its context of emergence, since, after the two World Wars, the 1929 stock market crash, and the rise of the Soviet Union, the Western world underwent a period in which capitalism, in order to sustain itself, relinquished its more liberal ideas and began to invest in a welfare state, with the state intervening more intensively in the economy and in the provision of public services to the population. This remained the case until the 1970s and 1980s, when theoretical currents labeled neoliberal began to be implemented by various governments, such as in Pinochet’s Chilean dictatorship. That is, neoliberalism became a political-economic practice following this welfare phase, with an emphasis on reducing the role of the State. Although this overview provides a minimal notion of what neoliberalism is, David Harvey conceptualizes it in a simple and insightful manner. According to the author,

Neoliberalism is, in the first instance, a theory of political-economic practices which proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.

The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices; the state has to guarantee, for example, the quality and integrity of money. It must also set up those military, defence, police, and legal structures and functions required to secure individual property rights and to ensure, if necessary by force, the proper functioning of markets. [...] State interventions in markets (once created) must be kept to a minimum, because, according to the theory, the state cannot possibly possess enough information to second-guess market signals (prices), and because powerful interest groups will inevitably distort and bias state interventions (particularly in democracies) for their own benefit (Harvey, 2008, p. 12).

It is observable that the core of this concept lies in the market, which must be dominant in society; however, the idea of individual freedom and entrepreneurship appears attractive at first glance – after all, who does not want to be free? What is not explicit is that this idea refers to an individualistic freedom, that is, a freedom of all against all, subordinated to the market, in other words, the freedom to be subjected to the market. It is no coincidence that we observe educational movements increasingly oriented toward entrepreneurship, protagonism, and the subject who chooses their own path, logically always subordinated to the market and unable to choose anything that contradicts it. These conceptual foundations are increasingly internalized within society and subjectivities.

In light of this, neoliberalism can be seen historically directing “reformist” movements in education in order to align it with its objectives. In this sense, curricula tend to be adjusted so that the capitalist system can advance. We may take, for example, literacy, which only began to reach the poorer strata of society when the market could no longer function without this type of labor force. Thus, even today, with regard to the teaching of reading and writing in schools, a strictly utilitarian concern persists, still tied to social practice:

Given the way society is organized, writing is present in productive dynamics and in the immediate spheres of common sense, such that it becomes a condition for belonging to the social order. What matters are pragmatic uses, in which material production and ideological reproduction predominate, an instance related to following instructions, receiving information, acting according to behavioral protocols, and assuming hegemonic ideological values (Britto, 2012, p. 75).

Currently, there is a concern with the formation of the subject for the so-called “knowledge” society, a designation that in itself can lead to many other reflections. In this context, subjects must meet new demands for the development of the market and the maintenance of the status quo. Corporate reformers once again view education as a space for constructing their projects and revive pragmatist philosophies adjusted to new levels of technological demand and social control in order to pressure educational “adaptation” through curricular changes (Freitas, 2014). The proposal of these educational projects appears disguised as a concern with poverty alleviation, based on the promulgation of the notion that individuals are in such conditions due to a lack of instrumental capacities that must be developed within the school environment.

The construction of critical knowledge, as well as the integral development of the subject, are not primary concerns, and the focus lies on the mastery of competencies so that the individual becomes useful to the system. When considering a formation aimed at breaking with common sense and expanding the learner’s ways of seeing the world, it is necessary to consider the sociocultural aspects involved in the process. In this case, teaching must go beyond the sphere of information and know-how, so as to enable critical autonomy for the integral formation of the individual, promoting their transcendence and allowing not only their participation in society but also their intervention in it. However, for the maintenance of the system, it is not convenient to exceed certain limits of knowledge, since control must be preserved. According to Freitas (2014, p. 1090), “business actors accept the correlation between poverty and low learning outcomes but defend the liberal thesis that it is the school’s role to compensate for social inequalities by guaranteeing access to knowledge, that is, by ensuring the ‘basics’ for all [...]”.

Thus, beyond influences on curricula and school organization, these educational reforms also affect the ways in which the quality of education is assessed, since large-scale assessments are applied based on pre-established standards without considering the individualities of each subject and school context. At times, the process is inverted, and assessment becomes the guiding force of learning, as schools must train subjects to achieve favorable evaluation indices. The very logic of external evaluation incorporates ideals from neoliberal pillars of “efficiency, competitiveness, and productivity, which apply to all productive sectors, including public services such as education” (Libâneo, 2018, p. 46). In this context, local experiences, idiosyncrasies, and diverse forms of knowledge are constrained by optimization, productivity, and accumulation – the school becomes a factory.

If the school is defined as a business or a service, its purpose is to produce something, to produce a student, to manufacture a student. If it is conceived as a right, this implies a reference to the duty of the state, and so on. In sum, criteria for the quality of education derive from statements about the educational purposes of the school. What, then, are the meanings of quality in education? (Libâneo, 2018, p. 50).[2]

Educational quality is linked to the purpose attributed to education, as well as to the way formal educational spaces, particularly the school. are approached. What has increasingly been observed is this neoliberal perspective of transforming all spaces according to a business-oriented, private, and individual logic; this significantly alters education, which we understand as a public, social, and historical space. In this sense, if education becomes individualized and turns into a means of insertion into the market, there seems to be no appropriate space for learning beyond mere lived experience – that is, for conceiving education as experience.

EXPERIENCE AND FORMATION

In order to address education and formation, we must engage with the question of experience. This is not understood as the mere passage of time, accumulation of knowledge, or dedication to a particular craft, but rather in a deeper sense, as already discussed by Benjamin (2017), experience as Erfahrung – as collectivity, communicability, tradition, dialectical relations between past and present – therefore, as something truly transformative. To this end, we develop some reflections, especially in dialogue with Larrosa (2002) and Benjamin (2017).

When we speak of experience and point to the problem of a formation whose objectives render it impossible, we are not referring to know-how[II], nor even to a form of education that places practice and instrumentalization at the center of attention. The experience to which we refer is not a prerequisite for a social function and may therefore, within neoliberal parameters, be considered useless, which is precisely why it interests us. It does not serve as an educational slogan, does not make any student more or less of a protagonist than another, and thus does not generate profit for companies and may not even attract a greater number of students if the institution requires a strategy. In a search within the Base document, we find its mention two hundred and six times (206), which may be considered contradictory, since what the discursive construction allows us to infer is the production of its loss. In this sense, we consider it relevant to clarify what we understand by experience, while also considering this other possibility that has been repeatedly reintroduced throughout the history of education, linked to the new and to modernization.

Larrosa (2002, p. 22) is particularly precise in stating that “a society constituted under the sign of information is a society in which experience is impossible”. For the author, knowing and informing oneself about something previously unknown is related to experience, since it is not something that merely happens, but something that happens to us, that affects us (Larrosa, 2002). Would it then be possible to create scenarios of collective experience when the objective is the development of competencies required by a highly specific market-oriented context? Among the circumstances that make experience impossible, the aforementioned theorist highlights the lack of time. In contemporary society – of 2.0 audio and video – where time is money and what is not digitally recorded is not lived, we observe a schooling process that seeks to adapt to “social demands”. In this context, it becomes necessary to introduce into schools, in place of disciplines such as Philosophy, something that fosters the development of a “Life Project”. Moreover, “socioemotional” skills must be developed. In this way, an educational remedy is sought for something that education itself is perpetuating. Shouldn’t the school be the place for the subject’s awareness and emancipation?

One of the authors to whom Larrosa refers in his essay is Benjamin, who, since the early twentieth century, had already denounced the decline of experience. One of the major issues raised by the German author is that the technical, industrial, and market development that promised the improvement of human life also enabled its destruction in the First World War. This war, which many might have considered a great experience, proved to be the opposite in the thinker’s view, as soldiers returned silent, impoverished in experience, and shipwrecked in trauma. In addition to the well-known “Experience and Poverty”, another of his essays that addresses this issue is “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”, whose core lies in the relationship between modernity, experience (a central concept in Benjaminian thought), and the lyric poet Baudelaire. According to Benjamin (2017), within the interweavings of the acceleration of capitalism and technical development in modernity lie the loss of experience (Erfahrung) and the incapacity for narrative, and thus for memory. The impossibility of memory stems from a modern mode of living in which consciousness attempts to protect the psychic apparatus from stimuli or shocks of modern experience; consequently, narrative gives way to information, and the newspaper emerges both as a reflection and as a cause of this impossibility of narrative, experience, and memory. As shock stimuli increasingly invade the psychic apparatus, consciousness increasingly attempts to defend itself and, therefore, separates the subject from the world, preventing the elaboration of experience. The German-Jewish thinker identifies an indication of this in the newspaper:

If the press had set itself the goal of allowing the reader to incorporate its information into his own experience, it would not achieve its purpose. But its intention is just the opposite, and it is for this reason that it achieves its purpose. Its intention is to isolate events from the sphere in which they could affect the reader’s experience. The principles of journalistic information (novelty, brevity, clarity, and, above all, the lack of connection between individual news items) contribute to this, as does the layout and style of newspapers (it was Karl Kraus who tirelessly exposed how the language of newspapers paralyzes the imagination of their readers) (Benjamin, 2017, p.109).

It is at this point that we insist: what Benjamin observed at the beginning of the last century with the press has only intensified with the advent of the internet. The isolation of events – that is, the fragmentation of reality into a lack of relation between facts; the idea of novelty when one almost always encounters the same; concision – “it suffices to think of what is today, on social networks, called a ‘textão’[3]: something that, in its supposed excess and cognitive demand, would nonetheless not fill half a page of War and Peace” (Silva, 2020, p. 8–9); and the question of form, both in writing and presentation, which, among other consequences, curtail the capacity for imagination. In other words, this excess, sequencing, and mode of journalistic writing eliminate spaces for imagination and contemplation. The world of novelty, fleeting information, and the constant replacement of techniques casts the subject not only into the impossibility of learning for life but also into the impossibility of self-elaboration. What the rise of information reveals is the advance of an objectivity emptied of substantive meaning, which no longer accommodates spaces for the unknown and for imagination.

If the loss of experience is exacerbated by the development of capitalism, and if access to information is not directly linked either to the construction of experience or to the notion of knowledge, we observe that the excess of information and activities demanded of the neoliberal subject increasingly alienates them from themselves and from the world. This further hinders the elaboration of experience. The school may present itself as a space of tension against this logic, but increasingly official documents emerge aligned with neoliberalism, with an excess of artifacts alongside a loss of substantiveness and depth. This issue can be observed, for example, in the teaching of literature since the publication of the National Curricular Parameters for Secondary Education (Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais do Ensino Médio – PCNEM) in 2000. Perrone-Moisés (2006) highlights how these documents mark a certain disappearance of the teaching of literature by privileging multimedia, digital, and non-verbal language, placing an excess of artifacts side by side in an indistinct literary market. The very term technologies alongside languages demonstrates the emphasis on the digital universe in this document, and this tendency only intensifies over time, culminating in the BNCC with its area of “Languages and their technologies”. The idea is simply that the new is better. Thus, new terminologies obscure older educational practices or even socially dominant models that are brought into the educational sphere. As an example of this, we have the National Common Curricular Base.

THE NATIONAL COMMON CURRICULAR BASE AND THE EMPTYING OF FORMATION

The National Common Curricular Base has been the guiding document for all educational curricula across Brazilian territory at all stages of Basic Education since December 2018. The document contains discourses and operational modes co-opted from market logic. In this way, the neoliberal elements outlined in the first section of this text are present in the Base; this manifests itself in many ways, including in an excess of artifacts which, by their very overabundance, hinder the development of experience as discussed in the second part of this text.

This document is divided into five parts. The first is the “Introduction”, which presents key concepts of the proposal, the general competencies of Basic Education, the pedagogical foundations of the Base, the notions of skills and competencies, the legislation that precedes it, among other more general elements; the second part explains the structure of the BNCC, including how its alphanumeric codes function and operate; the third, fourth, and fifth parts refer, respectively, to the stages of Early Childhood Education, Primary Education, and Secondary Education, the beginning of each chapter discusses some premises of that stage of education and subsequently develops the topics of each area of knowledge with their respective competencies and skills. Our discussion seeks to highlight the incorporation of neoliberal logic into the National Common Curricular Base and the impossibility of formation in a substantive sense due to its surrender to the market and the impossibility of experience. In particular, we analyze the “Introduction”, which presents the document, in dialogue with the educational premises of the Secondary Education stage, when the document appears to be fully oriented toward the adjustment of subjects. Based on the authors who underpin this analysis, we conduct a reading directed not only at what is explicit in the document, but also at its gaps and absences.

Those who read the document perceive a loss of the centrality of the idea of knowledge, the absence of substantive concepts of education and formation, as well as a lack of concern with cultural formation. This is because the BNCC operates on the premise that the school should develop competencies and lists ten general competencies for education. These general competencies are achieved through specific competencies of the areas of knowledge (Languages and their Technologies, Mathematics and their Technologies, Natural Sciences and their Technologies, Human and Applied Social Sciences) at the Secondary Education level. These specific competencies, in turn, are attained through skills to be developed. The logic of means and ends is embedded in this conception; moreover, it does not explicitly define what would constitute the “basic” in a curriculum, but merely deals with skills and competencies, which appear to reflect a purely pragmatic and individualistic character of education.

The ultimate expression of this formative bias in the BNCC lies in the production of amorphous subjects for an undefined purpose. This statement may sound strange, since the very word to form suggests, in its etymology, the idea of giving form to something. However, the document aims at the formation of an amorphous subject so that it can be molded according to the needs of the time and of the market. This formative project becomes even more pronounced at the Secondary Education stage, as the document itself states:

In this increasingly complex, dynamic, and fluid scenario, the uncertainties related to changes in the world of work and in social relations as a whole represent a major challenge for the formulation of policies and proposals for curricular organization in Basic Education in general, and in Secondary Education in particular (Brazil, 2018, p. 462).[4]

If the scenario is difficult, the educational process should be even more substantive so that learners, upon completing their education, are able to think about this world, insert themselves into it, and transform it. Formation, in this sense, should move toward the development of an autonomous and critical subject, aiming not only at adaptation to the prevailing labor model, but at an integral formation that enables socially transformative action. Under the educational model described above, there is no possibility of space for experience, if we consider the perspective of Larrosa (2002), since it refers to a subject whose formative objective requires a race against time to develop skills and competencies specific to market demands. The education proposed throughout the Base is repeatedly affirmed as being aligned with the interests of the student and of contemporary society. The aim is, therefore,

the basic preparation for work and citizenship, which does not mean the premature or precarious professionalization of young people or the fulfillment of the immediate needs of the labor market. On the contrary, it presupposes the development of competencies that enable students to actively, critically, creatively, and responsibly engage in an increasingly complex and unpredictable world of work, creating possibilities to make their life project viable and to continue learning, so as to be able to adapt flexibly to new conditions of employment or further development (Brazil, 2018, p. 465–466, emphasis added).[5]

The document expresses a preparatory orientation toward the labor market and then retreats by stating that this does not occur in a premature or precarious manner, nor with the aim of meeting immediate demands. Subsequently, it emphasizes the notion of equipping students with competencies for an unpredictable market. There is a clear attempt to maintain a notion of criticality in the document while simultaneously promoting conformity. Thus, the argument, which initially appears concerned with criticality and with the ways in which young people insert themselves into the labor market, collapses by failing to consider alternatives beyond mere adaptation, taken as both inevitable and inherently desirable. In an unpredictable and unstable world, the school should enable students to think about other possible worlds, as well as how to resist this logic without rendering their existence unviable.

Education, in a meaningful sense of the term, should not function as a process of mere adaptation, presenting a comfortable accommodation of the subject to the market or to the reality at hand. Only through the dual movement of adaptation and tension with the imposed reality can a truly formative process be conceived, whose outcome is the opening of other possibilities. As Adorno (2000, p. 144) argues, when addressing the tasks of education amid homogenization, the school “[...] would at this moment of omnipresent conformism have much more the task of strengthening resistance than of strengthening adaptation” (Adorno, 2000, p. 144). The education proposed in the Base, on the contrary, seems to become an apparatus of “formation” of one-dimensional subjects for a “one-dimensional society”, in which alternative and transformative possibilities are undermined.

The BNCC project at the Secondary Education level aims to “ensure that young people acquire learning to act in a constantly changing society, prepare them for professions that do not yet exist, to use technologies that have not yet been invented, and to solve problems that we do not yet know” (Brazil, 2018, p. 473). First, this notion of preparing for professions that do not exist is an idea that emerges from the market itself. The World Economic Forum has addressed this issue for some time, certainly in a positive manner. The Base, therefore, incorporates a conception of education aimed at adapting to this indeterminacy. To educate for the uncertain and for the nonexistent is to produce subjects suspended in a world moving toward the unknown – likely catastrophic – and along with it, the student. Contradictorily, this subject, whose defining feature is adaptation to uncertainty, is expected to carry out a life project. How can one construct a project, how can one plan for tomorrow if everything is uncertain, constantly changing, and one must await what does not yet exist? This only further demonstrates the alignment of this form of education with capitalism, since, as Crary (2016) argues, this system is incompatible with the idea of stability; perhaps the only stable feature of capital is its instability.

Another critique is that, in the document, the future appears almost as inevitable and unchangeable, as if we did not construct it but were merely subjected to it. This derives from the very loss of experience, from the loss of relation with the past, and from the loss of substantiveness in education, which is reduced to skills and competencies, forgetting that education is the development of the subject through all the experiences that happen to us, not merely individual, but collective, since there is a past that remains present in the educational act. What kind of society would we be today if not for Africans, Greeks, Jews, Romans? Moreover, how might we have a more harmonious relationship with nature if, in schools, we engaged with the experiences of Indigenous peoples? To abandon collectivity, experience, and the tension between past and present, which the school embodies, in favor of the individual development of the subject through competencies and skills, as well as a resigned and unreflective orientation toward the future, without considering the past and the present, only underscores the educational character present in the document.

To conclude the discussion, another point with which the document seems particularly concerned is international educational benchmarks and their evaluative methods. We can observe that, in the section entitled “The pedagogical foundations of the BNCC”, in order to justify a conception of education focused on competencies, the document refers to the fact that international organizations employ such parameters. Thus, the justification for adopting competencies as a premise stems from assessment instruments of international bodies, rather than from a reflection on education itself. In this respect, the document states that the concept of competency is

the approach adopted in international assessments of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which coordinates the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), and of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which established the Latin American Laboratory for Assessment of the Quality of Education for Latin America (LLECE).[6]

Thus, the examination that should serve to assess learning and rethink education comes to guide education; that is, assessment, which should function as a subsequent reflection on the process, comes to act as a formative premise; the objective of formation becomes assessment itself, which no longer functions as an analytical process of formation, but as its end. This discussion regarding the loss of curricular autonomy in favor of the market has already been addressed by Libâneo. The author argues that:

In the neoliberal project for the education of the lower classes in peripheral countries, pedagogical-didactic aspects are diluted within the curriculum and in external evaluation processes, leading to the loss of the specificities of the educational act, such as scientific formation, intellectual development, and the development of personality. Schools function merely to improve educational indicators; the teaching-learning process is reduced to the transmission of content from standardized materials and pedagogical packages; school assessment becomes subordinated to the content prescribed in national tests; and teachers have their profession emptied as they lose their autonomy (Libâneo, 2018, p. 57).[7]

The subordination of the school to testing and its submission to heteronomy is deeply linked to a commitment to the economy. When education becomes subject to the economy, it begins to justify itself “[…] by the services it provides to the economic system in preparing individuals for productive work, rather than ensuring the right of all individuals to their formation and development as human beings” (Libâneo, 2018, p. 64). This amorphous education presented in the BNCC, concerned with tests and results, oriented toward the labor market, and entirely guided by neoliberalism, prevents young people from establishing a genuine contact (an aesthetics) with objects and knowledge; everything becomes operationalized and managed rather than learned. The focus shifts away from the idea of knowledge and learning; the prevailing logic becomes learning to learn. We know that this form of learning ultimately amounts to learning how to play the market game, to bow to Mammon. The document that could delineate minimum curricula for national education instead surrenders uncritically to digital media and new technologies; it lacks substantiveness and a meaningful educational conception capable of rethinking our world rather than merely adapting to it. The belief that more technologies and external assessments would suffice to improve education amounts to nothing more than a new form of technicism (Freitas, 2014). Meanwhile, we increasingly inhabit a world emptied of experience, imagination, and poetry. There is no substantive formative process without contact, without experience, without trajectory and without drift; it is necessary to restore the full meaning of the word education and to recover a process that operates against the grain of the brutalization imposed upon us daily by the market.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

The present study set out to engage in a dialogue on neoliberalism, the BNCC, and the loss of experience in the context of formal education. Drawing on authors such as Larrosa (2002), Libâneo (2018), Freitas (2014), Benjamin (2017), and Adorno (2000), we discussed the neoliberal influences on curricular organization and on the school structure more broadly. In this sense, we reflected on the recurrence of educational “reforms” that propose nothing more than adaptation to what is understood as modern from a market-oriented perspective. In this context, everything is transient, and the term “traditional” becomes synonymous with outdated and, therefore, inadequate.

We observed that, within an educational model oriented toward instrumentalization and preparation for the labor market, there is often no space for the integral formation of the subject through practices that do not present immediate “utility” or that may even be considered useless within this system. We also discussed how the aforementioned economic model leads to a distortion of the concept of experience, treating it as a form of know-how linked to what is understood as competency and skill. However, we understand that the symptoms of the moment in which we live do not manifest themselves solely within the school environment, but in social life more broadly, since this concerns a model of society. Thus, the modern subject has no time for experience, living in function of productivity and under constant stimulation.

On the other hand, as educators and researchers, we understand the school as a space of discomfort, reflection, and emancipation, rather than as fertile ground for corporate and economic interests. There are, however, spaces of escape from this regime within the BNCC due to its greatest fragility: its breadth. Because the document leaves many points open or broad, it creates space for teacher action that runs counter to what the Base often proposes. From this perspective, as a form of resistance, it falls to us, as educators, to continue opening spaces for reflection and for slowness, thereby allowing for an authentic experience (Erfahrung), and thus one that is transformative for our students.

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Notes

[1] This study was funded by the Santa Catarina Research and Innovation Support Foundation (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa e Inovação do Estado de Santa Catarina – FAPESC), through Call No. 48/2021, and carried out with the support of the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel – Brazil (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Brasil – CAPES), Financing Code 001.

[2] Original: “Se escola é definida como empresa, serviço, sua finalidade é produzir alguma coisa, produzir um aluno, fabricar um aluno. Se é pensada como um direito, isso implica uma referência ao dever do Estado, e assim por diante. Em síntese, critérios de qualidade de educação decorrem de enunciados sobre finalidades educativas da escola. Quais são, então, os sentidos de qualidade da educação?” (Libâneo, 2018, p. 50).

[3] Translator’s note: The Portuguese term textão (augmentative form of texto, “text”) is commonly used in digital contexts to refer to a long written post – typically on social media, messaging platforms, or comment threads – often perceived as excessively lengthy or demanding in terms of attention and reading effort. The term may carry a mildly pejorative or ironic connotation, suggesting verbosity or disproportionate elaboration relative to the medium in which it appears.

[4] Original: “Nesse cenário cada vez mais complexo, dinâmico e fluido, as incertezas relativas às mudanças no mundo do trabalho e nas relações sociais como um todo representam um grande desafio para a formulação de políticas e propostas de organização curriculares para a Educação Básica, em geral, e para o Ensino Médio, em particular” (Brazil, 2018, p. 462).

[5] Original: “a preparação básica para o trabalho e a cidadania, o que não significa a profissionalização precoce ou precária dos jovens ou o atendimento das necessidades imediatas do mercado de trabalho. Ao contrário, supõe o desenvolvimento de competências que possibilitem aos estudantes inserir-se de forma ativa, crítica, criativa e responsável em um mundo do trabalho cada vez mais complexo e imprevisível criando possibilidades para viabilizar seu projeto de vida e continuar aprendendo, de modo a ser capazes de se adaptar com flexibilidade a novas condições de ocupação ou aperfeiçoamento posteriores” (Brazil, 2018, p. 465-466, emphasis added).

[6] Original: “o enfoque adotado nas avaliações internacionais da Organização para a Cooperação e Desenvolvimento Econômico (OCDE), que coordena o Programa Internacional de Avaliação de Alunos (Pisa, na sigla em inglês)11, e da Organização das Nações Unidas para a Educação, a Ciência e a Cultura (Unesco, na sigla em inglês), que instituiu o Laboratório Latino-americano de Avaliação da Qualidade da Educação para a América Latina (LLECE, na sigla em espanhol)”.

[7] Original: “No projeto neoliberal para a educação das camadas pobres dos países periféricos, os aspectos pedagógico-didáticos ficam diluídos no currículo e nas formas de avaliação externa, perdendo-se as peculiaridades do ato educativo como a formação científica, o desenvolvimento intelectual e o desenvolvimento da personalidade. As escolas funcionam apenas para melhorar os índices educacionais, o processo de ensino-aprendizagem fica reduzido à transmissão de conteúdos das apostilas dos sistemas de ensino e dos pacotes pedagógicos e materiais didáticos, a avaliação escolar fica subordinada aos conteúdos previstos nos testes nacionais, os professores têm sua profissão esvaziada à medida que perdem sua autonomia” (Libâneo, 2018, p. 57).