No profit left behind: os efeitos da economia politica global sobre a educação básica pública

Abstract

The object of this research is the capture of basic public education in most contemporary societies by the global macro-structure of political-economic power, composed of large multinational corporate oligopolies (finance included), supported by multilateral organizations of the international capitalist institutional system (World Bank, IMF and OECD, mainly), by powerful private foundations emanating from huge corporate empires such as Gates, Broad, Walton, among others, by think-tanks and large media outlets, both graciously funded by large global business corporations, in order to instrumentalizing that social sphere with a view to boosting and accelerating the process of accumulation of global capital in the context of the serious structural crisis that has plagued the capitalist mode of production since the mid-1960s. In this perspective, we will try to apprehend not only the connections between education and the crisis, but, above all, the systemic roots of it. Even admitting the relative autonomy of the educational complex vis-à-vis the economic system to which it is integrated, it is understood that, in the last instance, the structural constraints imposed by that process of accumulation determine the character and function that education plays in the total social complex in which it operates. In this sense, the general objective of this research is to investigate the influence of the global political economy on public basic education, elucidating the structural causes that contribute to the deterioration of the basic public education systems. In this direction, we articulate the specific objectives that, in general, are linked to the chapters that compose the present work. Thus, the specific objective of the first chapter is to examine the constituent elements of this global macrostructure in the context of the reproduction of capital in times of crisis. The second chapter has the specific objective of empirically and theoretically contextualizing and problematizing in national spheres the manifestations of the imposition of the educational model prescribed by the aforementioned macrostructure of power, examining in particular the US and Brazilian cases, and the third has as its specific objective to examine two national educational systems that overcome the global corporate education model, namely the Finnish and the Cuban ones. From the theoretical-methodological point of view, the present study unfolds in a bibliographical and documentary research, in which, in the light of dialectical historical materialism, it seeks to grasp the determinants of the current conjuncture of the global political economy of education. The results of the research pointed to the capture of public basic education by the oligopolistic macro-structure of global economic and political power and its exploitation with a view to boosting the trillion-dollar private education world market. It was verified that the implantation of this ultra pragmatic corporate educational model failed, wherever it was adopted, to achieve the declared objectives of recovering the level of educational performance and to eliminate the difference of performances among the students. In opposition to such model, the existence of the successful educational experiences in Finland and in Cuba has patently demonstrated the plausibility of constructing, in any social formation, a minimally just and effective educational system, thus demonstrating that the issue is political, rather than necessarily and only economic.