O movimento histórico de oferta das licenciaturas na Rede Federal de Educação Profissional: tendências e contratendências no contexto da crise estrutural do capital

Abstract

Contradiction is a constitutive part of reality and the movement of the real is driven by opposing forces. This movement is characterized by tendencies and counter-tendencies that, as dialectical pairs, mutually shape one another. The sociometabolic system of capital is experiencing a profound, unprecedented, structural crisis. The actions of international organizations, namely the World Bank, in containing contradictions in the context of a capital crisis extend across multiple sectors. Teacher education has been regarded by the bourgeois project of domination as being of utmost importance, given its role in shaping the working class to align with the needs of the market. In the Brazilian context, with the implementation of Law No. 11,892 of 2008, the Federal Institutes of Education, Science, and Technology (IFs) began to offer undergraduate teaching degrees as a new locus for teacher education. This research critically analyzes the historical expansion of undergraduate teacher education programs from the traditional and historical locus of universities to the Federal Network of Professional, Scientific, and Technological Education, unveiling its tendencies and counter-tendencies, and tracing the centrality of Competency-Based Pedagogy in the teacher training process within the context of the structural crisis of capital. To this end, it conducts a theoretical, bibliographic and documentary investigation, based on scholars who develop an onto-Marxist critique of the capitalist system. It concentrates primarily on recent measures for teacher training, based on documents comprising the National Policy for the Training of Basic Education Professionals (2016) and its guidelines, and analyzes data from the Nilo Peçanha Platform and the Higher Education Census (2022). As results, it shows that the expansion of the Federal Network of Professional Education represented a deepening of the neoliberal choice to lower the cost of providing education, but paradoxically it also expanded educational opportunities within the public system. Therefore, there was a prioritization of non-university higher education provision, to the detriment of the exclusive expansion of universities. The Competency-Based Pedagogy has been adopted as the dominant pedagogical framework in educational reforms in general, as well as in teacher education. There are two possible paths highlighted in teacher education reforms: one emphasizes theoretical primacy, while the other focuses on pragmatism. This duality aligns with the hegemonic bourgeois project, with an ontological root in the division between the manual and the intellectual work. In this context, teacher education assumes a central role in the achievement of capital accumulation objectives, aligning with the expansion of undergraduate programs from universities to the Federal Institutes of Education, Science, and Technology (IFs), generating a movement of tendencies and counter-tendencies. In view of attempts to reverse the falling rate of profit, an increase in the organic composition of capital is required and, consequently, a specialization in the field of education. The IFs should, therefore, promote specialized teacher education in hard sciences areas. The research, however, shows that the Federal Institutes (IFs) have played an important role in providing quality public education, and that the expansion of undergraduate programs within these institutions has produced results that differ from the goals intended by capitalist educational policies. Within the field of possibility, the contradictions inherent in the quest for hegemony of pedagogical conceptions within the Federal Institutes (IFs) produce the conditions for teacher education that extend beyond mere reproduction of the interests of capitalist society.