Currículo da cidade de São Paulo: a educação pública municipal no contexto do neoliberalismo

Abstract

This study aimed to identify and explain the theoretical and methodological perspectives that underpin the São Paulo City Curriculum in its relationship with the other dimensions that make up capitalist society. The critique developed regarding the aforementioned curricular policy was constructed through its historicization, by examining previous normative and prescriptive documents that gave rise to the conceptions adopted by the São Paulo City Curriculum. In the selected texts, the categories of school education, knowledge considered valid/legitimate, and teacher profile were analyzed as a strategy for understanding the worldview and the underlying sociopolitical and ideological project of the curricular policy in question. Based on critical curriculum sociology and historical-critical pedagogy, this qualitative research was guided by the methodological approach known as relational analysis. Explicitly counter-hegemonic, this approach allowed us to situate the concepts legitimized in the texts under study within the political, economic, and cultural sectors that drive the social order in which individuals who benefit from state-provided educational activities live. This relationship, by highlighting the impossibility of a neutral curriculum policy, provided an opportunity to access intentions previously implicit in the supposedly objective and decontextualized language typically employed in these documents. The research also revealed that the 1990s were decisive for the Brazilian educational field due to its assimilation of neoliberal and postmodern precepts, which have since influenced the development of curricula, especially those aimed at public basic education, through concepts, perspectives, and theoretical-methodological approaches aligned with the needs and purposes of this specific phase of capitalism. These, among other actions, operate the mechanisms of selection—and exclusion—of the knowledge that should be appropriated by students during this period of formation. The same neoliberal and postmodern ideology has also taken hold of the models and content that have shaped teacher training, especially continuing education, aiming for a specific professional profile endowed with values and behaviors that guarantee the reproduction of this ideology, even if unconsciously. As a result, the research demonstrated that the theoretical and methodological approaches adopted in the São Paulo City Curriculum align with the hegemonic intentions that prioritize the conservation and reproduction of capitalism, collaborating, via the distribution of a certain cultural and symbolic capital, to the realization of a project of subject and society incompatible with the qualitative transformation of the material conditions of life for the community