INTRODUCTION NOTES

[…] the written speech act is also an element of verbal communication. It is the object of active discussions in the form of dialogue and, moreover, it is made to be actively learned, to be studied, commented, questioned within the framework of inner speech, without counting the written responses, institutionalized, that are found in the different spheres of verbal communication (criticisms, reviews, which exert influence on later works, etc.). (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 123, our translation)

This text focuses on exposing the paths of methodological construction and theoretical foundation of the so-called comparative writing, on the one hand, approaching the broadest sense of language, that is, the author and the critical reader in the sense of the discourses; and, on the other hand, guided by comparison, in the methodological sense.

This last sense results from the use of a version of the comparative method, entitled “comparative studies”,¹ which supports another representation or another qualitative design of the comparison, crossing the areas of education, history of education and comparative sociology. This cross is intended “[…] to bring together what is commonly separated or to distinguish what is commonly confused […]” (Bourdieu, 1975, p. 29, our translation) and that “[…] is not likely to be studied separately from the investigations in which it is employed.” (ibidem, p. 11, our translation).

We used, as sources, part of the intellectual production of criticism about the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC — Brasil, 2017), selected and analyzed in a finalized research,² anchored in the techniques of comparative study, particularly aimed at apprehending the discovery, or not, of regularities, the perception of shifts and transformations, the construction of models and typologies, the identification of continuities and discontinuities, similarities and differences, making explicit the more general determinations that govern curricular debates. The intellectual production of criticism, in this proposition, becomes essential for us to inventory the thematic, theoretical, methodological, and political diversity through which the authors record their inquiries, point out discussions and set analysis goals, which per se constitutes a complex undertaking. However, within the limits of this text, this exercise rests on a sample — unlike the one carried out in the informed research, which analyzed 50 articles selected from journals in the curriculum area (Teias, e-Curriculum, Currículo sem Fronteiras, Espaço do Currículo), particularly in dossiers produced by the Brazilian Association of Curriculum (ABdC) — of research in Human and Social Sciences (Investigación Cualitativa and Pesquisa Qualitativa).

Also as a sample, the selected texts have criticisms capable of offering readings that take into account the tensions and disputes in the field of knowledge production on the curriculum, at the same time that, in the establishment of this criticism, they guide the ideological aspect of the sign “official curriculum”, assumed by the BNCC (Brasil, 2017). The criticisms decode the production of meaning for/in the curricular field, linked to an economy of symbolic exchanges, characterized by a logic governed by the social conditions of production, which respond to the symbolic effectiveness of school communication.

LANGUAGE, WRITING AND COMPARISON OF/IN COMPARATIVE WRITING

I live in the universe of the other's words. And my whole life consists of conducting myself in this universe, of reacting to the words of others (reactions can vary infinitely), starting with my assimilation of them (during the progress of the process of mastering the original language), and ending with the assimilation of the splendor of human culture. (Bakhtin, 1997, p. 383, our translation)

As authors of critical writing and critical readers, we assume authorship and discourse in the alteritarian relationship with other critics, in listening, in dialogue, in dissent and consensus. We base, in this relationship, the perspective that allows the other to find himself determined by joint reflection and, perhaps, by the exercise of constant vigilance.

The reading of the intellectual production on criticism that we do — or of the texts of others, or of others in the texts — emerge, in this text, from the interpretation and analysis that we consider as the only possible and right, in the perspective of text and others’ comparison, making the writing strange.

The centrality of the word in the intended writing is limited to an ethical question, or even meta-ethics, as words make sense in the curricular clash admittedly centered on ideological positions. In this way, it becomes possible to reach a consensus on the regulatory role of words in this clash, characterized by the language game, which gives the word the specific orientation called mobility by ^{Bakhtin (2003}), since the social environment organizes the enunciation or the manifestation of language.

To have that manifestation, it is necessary that any linguistic material enters the discourse plane, through statements chosen in the perception of the movement, the process, the struggle of the positions that, many times, lead to dissent and not to consensus but help in the situated written production, that is, “[…] conditioned by the singularity and irreplaceability of my place in the world: because at that moment and in that place, where I am the only one to be in each set of circumstances, all the others are outside of me.”. (Bakhtin, 2003, p. 21, our translation)

The record of multiple languages, expressions of spatial and symbolic distributions, decorative (indicating differential valuations of activities and institutional subgroups), or languages activated by the agents studied in different contexts and situations, indicates horizontality or asymmetries in the structures of institutional power.

Thus, we apprehend the other's discourse about the object, while recognizing that both the writing and the reading of a given text are always interdiscursive and intersubjective. To read, it is necessary to enter the discursive web that the text chooses to be constructed; to write, we are also faced with the other's discourse about the object.

This writing, whose communication relations are fed by relations of force, occurring in a transfigured form, cannot escape the “[…] ideological effect of absolutizing the relative […]” (Bourdieu, 1988, p. 30, our translation). The transfiguration is operated by a set of circumstances revealed by the acquisition and accumulation of specific capital (economic, linguistic, scientific, sporting, etc.), which imply objective conditions and, particularly for us, the one that expresses the comparison.

Comparative writing depends on the positions and dispositions of the habitus, which confer a “sense of the game” adequate to the conditions of production of senses and meanings about the positions assumed and to the categorization processes produced in and by the academic field, which necessarily presuppose the establishment of a reality as it is discursively constructed.

In this case, reality is referred to the curricular field, determined by discourses and texts that, on the one hand, incur the impossibility of detaching their speakers and their actions from the political, economic, social, educational spheres and from the ideological values that guide; on the other hand, they constitute socio-discursive phenomena, linked to the concrete conditions of their production (author and addressee maintain dialogic relations with other texts, text-statements).

This production approaches comparison, at the limit of comparative writing, not through the process of establishing the relationship between the compared model word and the word being compared, but through a process of constructing statements capable of establishing other ways of seeing, reading, perceiving, and representing led by specific mechanisms of capitalization that point, fundamentally, to the construction of a linguistic subfield with enunciative rituals in a more specific enunciative instance, the comparison.

At first glance, we are urged to deny the separation of the social conditions of production and realization of comparative writing and, at the same time, register the theoretical and methodological gains of this writing, which deals, among other things, with a better exposition of its own objects, organized by the principle of switching between ways of analyzing facts. Such a change is operated by the complexity of different orders that involve the social verbal interaction of the interlocutors, because

[…] the form and content of what can be said and what is said depend on the relationship between a linguistic habitus that is constituted in the relationship with a field of a certain level of acceptability (that is, a system of objective chances of positive or negative sanctions for linguistic performances) and a linguistic market defined by a high level of acceptability. (Bourdieu, 1983, p. 72, our translation)

The writing resulting from this form and content does not presume to represent the consistency or homogeneity, according to which all representation gives form to the laws of writing. Rather, it is governed by the logic of distinction (as a practice) and works in the linguistic market, delimited by comparison in the educational field, which anticipates the conditions in which discourses are received.

Historically, these receptions are anchored on the premise of a “mental operation”, whose best-known (but not only) goal is defined as controlling “variables”, from the perspective of testing causal propositions. This context is leaked by specific techniques for controlling these variables — from experimental to statistical, culminating in historical —, with differences in type, effectiveness, and scientific usefulness, but perceived as efforts to explain similarities and differences in social, political, and economic and educational phenomena, almost always between countries.

Alongside this explanation, we introduce the defense conveyed by Schriewer (1990, p. 39, our translation): “[…] willingness to redefine merely descriptive and differential categories such as ‘similarities/dissimilarities’ in evaluative terms such as ‘equality/inequality’ and to associate the latter with a contrastive scheme of ‘identity/difference’.”.

We seek to move away from parallelisms in the analysis of the internal development of a given object, in a historical and social time and from an educational field in relation to another field, with the intention of exercising the synchronisms and diachronisms, necessary to apprehend the relationship of this object with internal structures and/or external conditions that define their social interest for the research.

In this way, we discuss language as a discursive action. To do so, we take, as an investigative corpus, articles that shape the intellectual production of critics, in the exercise of presenting comparative writing.

COMPARATIVE WRITING OF INTELLECTUAL CRITICS TO VERSIONS OF THE BASE NACIONAL COMUM CURRICULAR

[…] a normative document that defines the organic and progressive set of essential learnings that all students must develop throughout the stages and modalities of Basic Schooling, so that their rights of learning and development are assured, in compliance with the provisions of the National Education Plan. (Brasil, 2018, p. 7, our highlights, our translation).

The relationship between educational policy and curriculum, permanent in the educational field, emerges, during the first decade of the 21st century, with the perspective of reconfiguration of the official knowledge policy, requested since the Federal Constitution of 1988, re-presented in the Law of Guidelines and Bases of National Education No. 9394, of 1996, as well as in the 2014 National Education Plan, in its principles and goals.

The attempts to respond to this reconfiguration, on the one hand, are irrigated by/in the production of curricular texts/documents, carrying the function of reconstructing the meaning of school contents and, on the other hand, controlled by the displacement of meanings and boundaries between the public, private, philanthropic, and non-governmental thing, informed by market principles made capable of offering instruments aimed at quality management, until now not evidenced by the public sector.

We infer, in this context, a strong presence of normative discourses, wrapped in the premises of generalization and universalism, addressed, and reproduced to/by the Ministry of Education which, since 2015, lists new concessions and wills for/in the formulation of BNCC (Brasil, 2017) for Basic Education.

However, such concessions and wills seem to disregard the set of up-to-date and available information for a qualitative debate on the relevance of establishing curriculum minimums and their availability in a democratically established context, but which suffers from the reorientations of capital.

The production of the BNCC (Brasil, 2017) supports and, at the same time, promotes a curriculum based on “competences” of a more technical nature, which highlights its preference for contents as “[…] an instrument for teaching management […]” (Macedo, 2015, p. 899, our translation), with the intention of projecting the student's performance, as, by the way, the MEC itself describes:

Skills and guidelines are common, curricula are diverse. The second refers to the focus of the curriculum. By saying that curricular contents are at the service of the development of competences, the LDB guides the definition of essential learning, and not just the minimum contents to be taught. (Brasil, 2017, p.11, our translation)

In view of this, large-scale assessment policies emerge and consolidate, independent of the school context, which support the BNCC (Brasil, 2017) not only as an official knowledge policy, but as an educational policy instrument, which embodies a national project, having disputes, references, and ideologies at stake.

Alongside this, we chose, as a source for the exhibition intended here, five articles, selected from previously defined criteria, namely:

We understand such authority from the perspective of certifying the quality of material content related to curriculum discussions; objectivity, in fair and attentive approaches to all the information announced for the analyses; and critical precision, in the security and confidence, presented by the authors, in the exposition of the data, as well as in the use of sources of information, documental and literary, consecrated in the area.

In this context, we have:

Considering, furthermore, that “[…] every choice derives from arbitrations that privilege certain aspects over others that are equally relevant.” (Valle, 2014, p. 18, our translation), we note that, together, these texts transit between writings oriented to fixing meanings (derived from the critical and post-critical theories), literary skills (post-reading) and, particularly, abstracted from situations addressed to a universal audience.

This record is methodologically founded by the election of areas of comparison,³ by criteria considered to be process, related to existing elements that support and maintain comparative writing, that is, the agents, the discourses, the school, and the curriculum.

The agents are identified by the position they occupy, in the social space, in the different fields (political, curricular, and academic) in which they operate, that depends on the relationship of forces in each of them, according to the typical logic of each field; the discourses, from the perspective of different enunciations that inhabit many social voices, which are completed, polemicized and/or responded to each other; the school and the curriculum delimit models of interpretations of what can be meant as school and, to a certain extent, as school and curriculum, insisting in the confrontation of the symbolic violence present in the curricular texts/documents.

It is worth mentioning that, as comparison areas, they organize the categorization, which is the examination of the available information, based on the tracking exercise and the identification of information about the conditions of its production, not limited to a series of observable facts, but elaborately idealized, according to which, in the action of comparison, they are expressed as models of explanation.

The BNCC (Brasil, 2017) has been analyzed, since its proposal, as a vehicle that consolidates the setback of/in Brazilian education, as it does not represent the different aspects of the relationship maintained between the State and its citizens and vice versa. Such aspects transit between the examination of the construction of democracy to the consolidation of the Brazilian educational system, through different approaches, and the institutional one. This is because this examination fails to explain the ambiguity between the emergence of a market economy and a society that is passive and distrustful of its elected representatives and its political institutions, as the foundation of democracy.

The curricular and normative document produces adverse conditions for the democratic strengthening and institutionalization of a participatory political culture, already unnoticed, in the way in which it manifests itself, with emphasis on its condition of “savior” of the schooling process of a nation, supposedly performed without a resume. This because “[…] it is expected that the BNCC will help to overcome the fragmentation of educational policies, give rise to the strengthening of the collaboration regime between the three spheres of government, and be a guide to the quality of education.” (Brasil, 2017, p. 6, our translation).

Articulated by different civil, public, and private agents, the BNCC (Brasil, 2017) is characterized as an intelligible object of “knowledge”, placing educational objects (learning rights/objectives/expectations/skills/knowledge/contents) as capable of repairing the educational problems, and the problems of the Brazilian school are beyond the “quality” item (Macedo, 2014; Laclau apud Cunha and Lopes, 2017). In this way, linked to

‘good’ quality of education to the BNCC as a promise that students will be creative, autonomous, participatory, cooperative subjects is not only illusory but perverse. Not only because it is an impossible promise to keep, but also because it is a promise based on the privilege of interests and projects not directly linked to the multiple and different unique contexts of students as subjects of education. (Cunha and Lopes, 2017, p. 31, our translation)

For these persons, the BNCC is now “[…] understood as a right for all, as a guarantee of social participation through school studies and as an obligation of the State to guarantee the conditions for its feasibility, for all Brazilian people […]” (Almeida and Silva, 2018, p. 605, our translation), in compliance with Brazilian laws “[…] which define, from 1988 to 2014, the need for a Curriculum Base for the Country.” (ibidem, 2018, p. 605, our translation).

This need is fueled by a historical chronology that disregards the impeachment of former president Dilma Rousseff, a moment in which the Ministry of Education (MEC), in relation to BNCC, continues a process marked by ruptures in relation to the content and conceptions that it represented. In this context, political negotiations shifted and the Movimento pela Base (Movement for the Base)⁴ came to the scene, formed by organic intellectuals representing private educational groups, responding to an articulated demand for quality/equity.

In ^{Cunha and Lopes (2017}, p. 31, our tanslation) we saw criticisms of this demand, initiated by a position contrary to the idea that the BNCC “[…] is not an instrument of prescription or hegemonization […]”, followed by an operation with the premise of “[…] elaboration of a text, supposedly free of ambiguities, which denounces a presumptuous faith that does not control its reading.”.

It is interesting to state that the debate around this premise rekindles the service to the “[…] interests of large, internationalized groups […]” (Almeida and Silva, 2018, p. 604, our translation), among others, which represent

Entities such as the Union of County Education Principals (UNDIME), the National Forum of Faculties of Education Deans (FORUMDIR), the National Union of County Education Councils (UNCME), the National Association for Professional Training in Education (ANFOPE), the National Confederation of Education Workers (CNTE), among others, together with non-governmental organizations of civil groups, such as the Movement for the National Common Base, or even by actions supported by large financial conglomerates, such as the Lemann Foundation, the Roberto Marinho group (associated with Rede Globo de Telejornalismo) and Banco Itaú […]. (Cunha and Lopes, 2017, p. 25, our translation)

An educational project, to constitute the formal education of a nation (Almeida e Silva, 2018, p. 605, our translation), needs to be necessarily “[…] marked by the construction of social cohesion and not only marked by meeting the requests of some hegemonic economic groups.”. Disregarding this need, the BNCC is halfway through an announcement of guidelines, without making explicit the context and diagnoses to which it intends to respond (ibidem).

^{Cunha and Lopes (2017}, p. 26, our translation) deepen this territory of non-response, building criticisms anchored in the discursive record, initiated in the post-foundational perspective, whose anchoring and orientation depart from the “[…] derridian notion of noun, text, interpretative context, and dissemination as a theoretical-strategic operator to think about the document.”. It is worth mentioning that they defend what constitutes an interpretative context through which the BNCC can be read as what is lacking in “good” quality education (Cunha and Lopes, 2017, p. 27, our translation), that is:

Under the name BNCC, a set of practices has been designed through which the link between education-knowledge-equity takes place, seeming to make equivalent the notions of democracy (democratization), law, and distribution of knowledge as goods (objects) to be appropriated. In the policy texts investigated by us, such terms are interchanged, replaced by each other in a naturalized way. […] In the current curricular political struggle, the name BNCC constitutes a supplement of what education lacks and what (it is supposed to be/) will be guaranteed by the definition of learning expectations […] Inserting the discussion of the right to learning, precipitates the idea that ensuring macro rights, […] includes choosing “the knowledge that contributes to the realization of the right to learn and develop in the stages of Basic Education” […] The name NCCB interposes if as the search for comfort that the promise of a full education (the production of an idealized national identity, consequent to the guarantee of knowledge) claims to be able to achieve. […] suggests that there is “an official seal of truth” (Lopes, 2015a) for “a set of contents that acquires the power of essential knowledge to be taught and learned” (ibidem, p. 26, 28-30, our emphasis, our translation).

From these speeches, we apprehend that society and knowledge appear objectified, since, in addition to a knowledge supposed to be essential and in the idealized formation of an educated subject, impossible to be guaranteed as such (Lopes apud Cunha and Lopes, 2017),

[…] is based on the belief in education as a totality, on the structural reading of society as a closed totality. Faced with this totality, education, via BNCC, performs the task of salvation, of suturing the lack of quality. […] This greater curricular detailing, reaffirms the curriculum as a guide, limiting the educational act to the work of conformation of the relationships and the subjects of the different educational spaces-times to what is previously determined by the epistemologies and by the experiences endorsed as ‘most adequate ‘. […] the erasure of the constitutive differences of contexts is projected, aiming at something treated, in a restrictive conception of curriculum, as common. […] “the level of specification of this ‘common base’, explained in the DCN [National Curricular Guidelines, 1998a], is very low when compared to other countries (even with those that attribute great autonomy to their schools, such as Finland and New Zealand)”, […] In addition to this objectification of what we defend to be imponderable and intangible, such objects are judged as capable of repairing educational problems. (Cunha and Lopes, 2017, p. 26 e 27, our translation)

Thus, “Connecting education and BNCC as a guarantee of equity is a mythologizing simplification that seeks to exclude from education what cannot be controlled or enclosed, cannot even be known.” (Cunha and Lopes, 2017, p. 33, our translation). A failed promise is re-signified, that is, to ensure common knowledge to all.

^{Macedo (2017}, p. 540, our translation), returning to curriculum theory “[…] understood as a normative discourse that delimits what can be meant as curriculum and, to a certain extent, as education and school […] ”, argues that “[…] education speaks of the other as that which that has not yet been invented […]”. It also maintains “[…] that curriculum theory has sanctioned a meaning for education that involves the conformation of subjectivity to a project of re-cognition […]” (Macedo, 2017, p. 545, our translation), when what is needed is to return to the role of “[…] creation of tools to analytically distinguish between school and non-school knowledge.” (ibidem, p. 544, our translation).

Thus, theory would have a normative role in establishing criteria for curricular decisions based on the structural distinction between knowledge and experiential knowledge. Only the former should be part of the curriculum, as its acquisition “requires curricular structures located in schools and the support of teachers with specialized knowledge and connections with universities that make them capable of selecting, organizing and sequencing contents” (Young, 2014a, p. 15). (Macedo, 2017, p. 544, our translation).

The question “but doesn't the school have to teach?” is based on the idea that the curriculum needs to fulfill the role of creating a recognition of the subject in the culture. Including “[…] there are traditions of curriculum theory that sanction the understanding that good education must be based on a project of recognition of the subject in his culture, in his society, in rational communities.” But “[…] recognize themselves in what?” (Macedo, 2017, p. 540, our translation).

[…] the experience of recognition, transformed into a project by curriculum theory, is an ethical-political violence with perverse effects on difference. This does not imply, however, the insanity of taking the experience of recognition as something that can or should be avoided, but only that this inevitability does not make recognition projects legitimate. (ibidem, p. 541, our translation)

About this, ^{Almeida and Silva (2018}, p. 617, our translation) discuss “[…] the epistemological character of the knowledge worked on by all in the school curriculum […]”, involving the debate on the premise of “comprehensiveness of school education” and “[…] what is up to purpose of the school and its coherent competence, as a social agency for the formation of knowledge of generations […]” (Almeida and Silva, 2018, p. 597, our translation) .

In this situation, they list two ways of understanding comprehensiveness. The first is based on joining the parts of a whole, based on the assumption that common sense, as necessary, assumes “[…] that education does not yet know exactly what its constituent and essential actions are. When realizing the dispersion of the components of education, they add pieces that are missing.” (Almeida and Silva, 2018, p. 601, our translation). As a second definition, “[…] the word integral has to do with integrality from its essence: conceptual and practical coherence with its fundamental purposes.” (ibidem, p. 602, our translation).

Several agents want the school to meet their interests, but “The role of the school is to do its part within the perspective of learning to form the integral being […]” (Almeida and Silva, 2018, p. 600, our translation), at the same time that “Integral education, therefore, is one that does its part well: the formation of sensitive, citizen, peaceful, tolerant, competent, reader, scientific, historical, situated, artistic, reflective, liberating and labor intelligence […]” (ibidem, p. 601, our translation).

The school does not exist to meet the social demands of specific groups, as

[…] the school is not instrumental in commerce, industry, or service of any kind. It is instituted to create generations that think, communicate, educate themselves to write, read, criticize, propose, develop scientific and technological thinking, and be motivated and equipped to always know how to study. Its contents are not those elected by industries or producing companies, but those of knowledge produced by humanity in the arts, sciences, literature, mathematics, history, philosophies, culture in general. […] The domain of school knowledge is its space to present, analyze, criticize, dominate languages of the epistemological instruments of the material, social and cultural world. (Almeida and Silva, 2018, p. 606, our translation)

The authors add, to this point, five topics to bring the construction of this curricular form closer to social, cultural, linguistic, scientific, and historical knowledge, aiming to consolidate the schoolwork of training students’ cognitive skills. For that, they locate the real function of the school happening in a “[…] place of astonishment, indignation, and epistemological curiosity […] a place of the first analyzes and systematic diagnoses […] of the understanding of phenomena, by Culture.” (Almeida and Silva, 2018, p. 612, our translation), as well as a “[…] multiple intervention in society […]” (ibidem, p. 612, our translation) and, “[…] the place of creative and critical participation in the world through reading and writing.” (ibidem, p. 614, our translation).

In that way,

The curriculum proposals do not clearly define what the school's own knowledge is, which makes the debate conceptually aimless – and the document itself appears to be contradictory to a coherent view of what the school's own knowledge is. Pedagogical fads, economic and party-political pressures become the defining – volatile – of the choice of its purposes and methodologies. (Almeida and Silva, 2018, p. 605, our translation)

^{Campos and Gisi (2019}) explore the record of similarities in curriculum propositions from the 1960s to the BNCC, stating that the presence of private initiatives and international bodies helps in the development of Brazilian education as an object of investment.

The understanding of education as an investment began to gain strength in the 1960s, but mainly during the military dictatorship. Although we are in another historical moment, the legacies of that period are present until the present day. Among the consequences entailed for education are the “[…] linking of public education to the interests and needs of the market […]”, “[…] favoring the privatization of education […]” and “[…] a successful postgraduate model implemented based on the American organizational structure and the European university experience.” (Saviani, 2008b, p. 291 apud Campos and Gisi, 2019, p. 364, our translation).

The term “qualification” appears linked to employment and the set of workers’ rights and “[…] is replaced by ‘skills’ in the social and pedagogical vocabulary.”. (Campos and Gisi, 2019, p. 362, our translation).

These competences are those required by the employ market, which makes the private productive sector (national and international) the main guide for curricula and contents, teaching and assessment methods, educational public policies. […] Within the capitalist logics, the public is scrapped and criticized so that the private sector is seen as the solution, establishing a lucrative educational scenario. (ibidem, 2019, p. 353 and 362, our translation)

There is a need to overcome discussions about the influences of the new configuration of neoliberalism in the curriculum and in the creation of new public and educational policies, in order to meet the understanding of how “[…] it is promoted with the new interfaces of globality […]” (ibidem, p. 4), which enter “[…] the ‘micro spaces’ of Neoliberalism, in order to understand the strategies used by neoliberals who defend the dissemination of ‘private’ solutions to the ‘problems’ of public education.” (Ball, 2014, p. 25 apud Sousa and Aragão, 2018, p. 4, our emphasis, our translation).

This new configuration of neoliberalism has generated deep transformations in the public sector, promoting its disqualification, creating new forms of relationship between the public and the private, inserting new forms of administration in the molds of the market. […] In the scope of educational policies, the effects of Neoliberalism have transformed the policy formulation process. An arena for the dispute of interests is formed, opening space for representatives of civil society, that is, people with strong political influence who defend the interests of the groups they represent; multilateral organizations that operate in different countries; private sector institutions; unions; scientific associations, among other groups that compete for space and voice in the formulation of educational policies. (Sousa and Aragão, 2018, p. 5, our translation)

^{Sousa e Aragão (2018}) propose “[…] reflection on the meaning of the expressions ‘expectations of learning’ and ‘right of learning and development’ expressed in the BNCC […]” (p. 4, our translation), given that “The market starts to rely on the State to create favorable conditions for its development […]” influencing “[…] directly the formulation of public policies that have strategically reached people's subjectivity […]” (p. 4, our translation).

The “[…] ideas of an enterprising man, individual freedom, ability, and competence […]” are now emphasized (Sousa and Aragão, 2018, p. 4, our emphasis, our translation) “[…] in a perspective that reinforces the notions of performativity and competence […]” (ibidem, p. 10, our translation). In such a way,

[…] it becomes improbable that a curricular policy encompasses the entire cultural plurality existing in the country. […] the feeling of belonging to a nation is used as a strategy to homogenize the culture, thought and possibly the control of the subjects’ actions. (Sousa and Aragão, 2018, p. 9-10, our translation)

Perhaps the greatest critical contribution to the BNCC (Brasil, 2017) is not only in denouncing the perspectives of homogenization or control, for its guidance in directing what is intended to be taught at school, but in building the perspective of apprehending it in relativization. It is not a question of quitting the legal precepts for each school to interpret and apply according to its understanding. It is about trying, as much as possible, to problematize the relationship between the system, its attempts at interventions and the place, with its ways of facing control.

We reached this perspective, through the areas of comparison, as models of explanation, but also as part of the characterization of a discursive universe that, on the one hand, represents the different position of agents according to an unequal distribution of material and symbolic resources and, on the other hand, a set of symbolic schemes, which takes the form of dispositions or potential socially acquired and tacitly activated ways of interpreting and classifying.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

As we assume, as the object of this concern, the paths of construction, reasoning and the exercise of comparative writing, we choose excerpts from articles inserted in/removed from a dialogical relationship marked by the complexity of the statements, directing us to the understanding of a normative curricular document that, on the one hand, is delimited by the relationship between writers and their written productions and, on the other hand, corresponds to the ability to function and circulate critics as an ideological sign.

This exercise summarizes the action we operate on the Other. That is, extrapolating the understanding of the dialogical principles identified by this author, in the dialogue of other authors, but oriented according to the interlocutors, the social audiences. These audiences become a need for dialogue with the movement to produce discourses and knowledge about the BNCC (Brasil, 2017), which transit carrying authoritative and internally persuasive words (Bakhtin, 1992).

The first group of words, in the field of critics, is outlined by the recognition of the religious, political, and moral confrontation that sustains the words of the State, in the name of education, of teachers, among others, not requiring inner persuasion for the awareness of its intentionality; it only requires recognition and assimilation from us. We come to this requirement, in the presented writing, responding to the requirement of a symbolic market, whose perspective focuses not only on the materiality of educational facts, but also on their description, interpretation and location in each curricular space-time.

The second, in this same field, needs authority, usually half ours, half others, which is decisive for the process of ideological transformation of individual consciousness. This is because the words of our (and others’) discourses are reorganized in the context we choose, that is, the comparison, by entering a qualifying, provocative and/or conflicting interrelationship and, by doing so, instituted as “my”. Such an institution contributes to constituting the structure of this ideological sign, the official curriculum, in a way that is both deeper and more widely recognized (that is, authorized) possessing a semiotic value of representation.

In that way, the others’ speeches permeate the construction of “my” speech, becoming the link of the discursive communication intended by comparative writing, assumed by articulations of the words brought/translated by the subjects (speaker, writer, or reader) with an active position in the articulation in the field (curricular and educational) of the object, in the form of materialization of the word and in the production of meanings.

In this context, the critics on the BNCC (Brasil, 2017) denote theoretical investments by the agents, framed by the narrator,⁵ in their speeches and in the appropriate speeches, for the written production, by an idea or an enunciation, aligned with an intentionality that is not to be confused with intention, but whose dialogism about the school and the curriculum is found in the forms of intentional act of interpretation, with directions defined by the narrator of comparative writing, the “me”.

Finally, we argue that comparative writing is not just a form, which can be understood and analyzed only by comparison, isolated from the verbal and social interaction of the interlocutors through/in the texts. This is because it gradually starts to make sense as a semiotic object in the field of curricular analyzes and interpretations of critical intellectual productions, acquiring the role of an autonomous causal agent.