EDUCATING THROUGH MARKET METRICS: PROPOSALS OF THE BUSINESS COMMUNITY FOR THE WORKING-CLASS YOUTH AND THE HIGH SCHOOL REFORM

Abstract

Controlling education policies has been a recurring practice for the business community, and the high school reform has become symbolic of such influence. This paper analyze the significance of the youth and high school education project by the business community, thus unveiling its purposes and assumptions and how they are linked to the reform. This analysis arises from research conducted at a Master’s level that used primary and secondary sources, such as documents produced by corporate foundations, notably the organization Todos pela Educação [All for Education] and Instituto Unibanco, as well as regulatory and normative documents. From this set of documents, three analytical categories were selected, since they were deemed the most relevant for the way they support the proposals of the business community: competence pedagogy, accountability and youth protagonism. This paper concludes that the business community’s education project for the working class youth is characterized by a ‘capture’ of subjectivity: social-emotional skills seek to imprint in young people self-control, team working and resilience, in the midst of the structural crisis of capital; accountability aims at the subjectivation of neoliberal rationality resulting from financial capital with its neurotic pursuit of increases in ‘human capital’; and youth protagonism is characterized as a strategy through which capital seeks to 'actively submit' young people to its rationality, that is to say, through manipulative discourses and strategies, it seeks to make young people believe that they are the authors of their own domination.