Curricular policies and reforms in Brazil: curriculum perspective from historical-critical pedagogy versus the common curricular national basis and the pedagogy of competences

Abstract

In the last 20 years, the issue of scholar curriculum and other educational policies have been the subject of constant reforms in Brazil, our objective in this paper is to expose the curricular reforms that took place and how the process of elaborating the National Base (BNCC) currently in force in Brazil (BRAZIL, 2017, 2018), as well as analyzing and exposing some principles of pedagogy that directs the document: the pedagogy of competences. In the sequence we present the understanding and defense of curriculum and scholar knowledge from the assumptions of historical-critical pedagogy, which has its theoretical foundations anchored in historical and dialectical materialism. We show that the conception of training that guides the BNCC is based on an instrumental and utilitarian rationality, directed by business interests. We analyze that the intention is to deepen the emptying of the function of the school, the teacher and the scholar curriculum, denying objective and systematized knowledge and reinforcing a pragmatic, utilitarian and technicist pedagogy, whose objective is the technical training for employment and not to form for work with meaning in human emancipation. Concomitantly, we observe that the conception that directs the BNCC has as its final objective the absolute control of the process of formation of the individuals, through the control of the curriculum for basic education, teacher training and the evaluation in large scale.