Educating Working Youth Through Market Metrics

Abstract

The control over the Brazilian high school reform amidst the 2016 Parliamentary Coup became symbolic of the business community’s influence on education policies. This paper therefore attempts to answer the following question: What are the content, characteristics, and rationales behind the public education project for young people proposed by the business community and set in motion through the high school reform? How can we state that this project conforms to the interests of capital in the current stage of social reproduction within the framework of productive restructuring? This analysis arises from research that used primary and secondary sources: documents produced by corporate foundations, notably the organization Todos pela Educação [All for Education] and Instituto Unibanco; regulatory and normative documents; and public hearings on MP746/2016 [Provisional Presidential Decree 746/2016]. This paper seeks to answer the proposed question based on three analytical categories: competence pedagogy, accountability, and youth protagonism. It concludes that the business community’s action to promote an education project for the working class is a device to adjust the instruction of young people to the demands of new work management organizations, to consolidate the expansion of capital’s rationality from the point of production to that of social reproduction - in this case, the education of the working class - and materializes in school through discourses and practices that subjectivize this rationality, such as social-emotional skills, accountability, and youth protagonism.