Pensamentos (neo)liberais sobre educação: uma análise da produção discursiva do Instituto de Estudos Empresariais (1994-2020)

Abstract

The rise of discourses to the right of the political spectrum has been garnering special attention of Human Science’s researchers from various Western countries. As a common aspect of the rising of the right around the globe, it is noteworthy the overlap of the economic discourse in related to the forms of social organizing, as well as the subject’s own intimate life, in a process of rationalization of daily practices, that has been named neoliberalism. In the educational field, neoliberal discourses act, mainly, with the scope of reforming the schools as well as the school’s community, to converge to the logics of competition and individualism. Yet, there are intrinsic specificities to the formation of the neoliberal discourse that need to be examined. Aware of that, this article aimed to comprehend the ways in which reformist discourses about the educational area vehiculated by the book series Pensamentos Liberais, since its first volume, in 1994, until its twenty-fourth, in 2020, produced (neo)liberal educational concepts in contemporary Brazil. The goals of the study were: to narrate in what ways the Freedom Forum of Porto Alegre became one of the main producers of neoliberal discourses in contemporary Brazil; to enunciate the discursive practices as it relates to Education, engendered by the book series Pensamentos Liberais; to analyze the means in which the discursive practices of the Pensamentos Liberais books inscribe the discourses of educational reforms in a real regime; and to discuss the effects of the (neo)liberal concepts of education in the Brazilian educational field. Therefore, the proceedings of a documentary analysis, with the comprehension of adopting the documents as historical monuments. The 24 volumes of the Pensamentos Liberais book series were considered as a documentary archive of an empirical corpus composed of 17 articles in which the educational theme was the focus of the discussion, in addition to other 19 articles with non-centralized discussions pertaining to the educational area, but in which the theme was somehow discussed. From a shredding of the materials, emerged the following events discursive to the discussion: the Human Capital Theory; the dichotomy between elementary education x university education investments, the model of financing of the educational voucher; the imperative of the teachers’ wage valorization according to their performances; the adoption of comparative metrics between Gross Domestic Product expenditures x large-scale assessments’ results; and the “problem” of public education having a State-defined curriculum. It was concluded that the discursive production of Brazilian neoliberal education mixes values that originate in the Chicagoan and Austrian economic schools of thought, with the scope to forge individualist subjects critical to social incentives, which would be immoral towards the Market and would restrict freedom of choice, achieved only with the acceptance of selfishness as an existence’s Becoming.