Elements for a history of youth schooling in Brazil: a curriculum critique

Abstract

In the course of the last century, the modernization of secondary education occupied a fairly representative space on the agenda of political and academic concerns in Brazil: whether prioritizing the democratization of education systems facing the preparation of 'leading individualities', be empowering new teaching models and organization of school work with a focus on students. We saw the emergence of a heterogeneous set of political rationales that, despite their controversies, bet on new training designs for youth schooling. However, with the emergence of neoliberalism and the new training demands derived from it, the will to modernize became increasingly impatient and unaccustomed to negotiating meanings with teachers and contemporary youth. The modernizing compulsion led us to an interdiction of the future and the emergence of an inability to respond critically and creatively to the challenges of the youth school in the 21st century. The intensification of curricular reformulation movements for secondary education, ongoing in recent decades, was described as a modernizing compulsion.