Self-entrepreneur culture: the Business Education and the new governmentality

Abstract

In this essay we discuss the topic of self-entrepreneur culture that permeates Brazilian educational debate in recent years. Such culture is justified by a set of principles from the neoliberal market, which transfers the business devices to the pedagogical scope. In other words, things like productivity, competitiveness and performance are subordinating teachers and students to a new governmentality. Hence, our objective is to analyze the role played by entrepreneurial pedagogical rationality in guiding the forms of self-government and the government of others. We started from the following questions: Why insert the culture of the self-entrepreneur in schools?  Is this culture sufficient to solve social inequalities as suggested by authors who advocate it? What have we done with ourselves in the ways of life controlling? We start from the assumption that the self-entrepreneur culture translates itself into what Foucault called governmentality. Therefore, Foucault’s criticism of neoliberal society emerges as a theoretical framework capable of developing on different bases rather than those neoliberal conceptions to which school education is inserted today.