Graduate education, researcher training and intellectual rigor in brazilian education

Abstract

This opinion article discusses the training of researchers in graduate programs in Education in Brazil in a context shaped by system expansion, productivity pressures, and increasing demands for academic quality. It argues that, in part of these programs, there remains an imbalance between theoretical grounding and methodological rigor, with excessive emphasis on established authors and repertoires and less investment in formulating research problems, building corpora, producing evidence, and sustaining analytical inferences. The discussion is organized around five axes: training for reproduction rather than investigation; hyper-theorization and low empirical density; academic endogeny and epistemological closure; CAPES evaluation and quantitative productivism; and tensions among the public commitment of science, investigative rigor, and discursive performativity. The article argues that graduate education loses strength when it confuses erudition with investigation, theoretical affiliation with intellectual autonomy, and quantitative output with scientific quality. Training researchers requires bringing back to the center the research question, method, systematic work with data and sources, epistemological plurality, and the public responsibility of knowledge production.