High school reform and common national curriculum base: current forms of expression of capital in education

Abstract

The coup of August 2016 resulted, in the field of education, in the resumption of a discourse about the need to reform High School, with an emphasis on the need to enable professional training, employability and adaptation to the worlds of work. In the context of this process, the 2017 High School reform and the definition of a new National Common Curricular Base (BNCC) were produced in 2018. The ongoing reform process is not new and reaffirms the need to adapt the education systems to the demands posed by the transformations of capitalism, which, due to its crisis, needs to expand ways of extracting surplus value through the expansion of productivity and precariousness of work. The first part of the text presents the way in which this process expressed different conceptions of organization of this level of education: the pedagogy of competences and learning to learn and work as an educational principle. In the second part, we show the proposals for the reorganization of secondary education in the context of the 2016 post-coup, materialized in the reform of secondary education and the BNCC. In the third part of the text, we analyze how the emphasis given to training itineraries and curricular flexibility compete as elements that promote greater disqualification of teaching work and the expansion of the structural duality in High School, in addition to making integral training unfeasible and expanding the problems already present in this level of education.