Abstract

PIZOLATI, Audrei Rodrigo da Conceição  and  ALVES, Alexandre. ACCOUNTABILITY, MERITOCRACY AND SOCIAL DISTILLATION IN BRAZIL. Eccos Rev. Cient. [online]. 2021, n.58, e11137.  Epub Feb 06, 2024. ISSN 1983-9278.  https://doi.org/10.5585/eccos.n58.11137.

This paper investigates the reasons for the change of emphasis in Brazilian pedagogical proposals in two historical moments: between the 1920s and 1930s and between the 1990s and 2010. With this aim in mind, sources such as the 1st National Conference on Education (1927), the Pioneers Manifesto (1932) and, for the contemporary period, national laws and decrees (1996-2018) are analyzed. In the first context, it was possible to verify that the debate between biological and sociological knowledge in search of legitimacy finds its main stage of dispute in the area of education. In the past, intellectuals influenced by eugenics turned to biology as a way to modernize the country through eugenic education and the exclusion of “unwanted” individuals. In recent decades, there has been a return of this type of discourse with a biological basis, but now the biosocial exclusion of subjects no longer appeals to the nation's ideology, but to the neoliberal sacralization of “meritocracy”. From the comparison between the two contexts, it can be concluded that the change of emphasis in the pedagogical proposals that once stood out for the social, now aims at the individualizing training of the flexible and self-responsible “neo-subject”. School success and failure are seen as dependent only on the individual's ability to manage her or his own life and not as a result of structural problems in society, which has led to an increasing process of social disaffiliation.

Keywords : social disaffiliation; meritocracy; responsibility policies..

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