Introduction

Defining the market as a paradigm of social relations underlying several fields of human activity is a phenomenon which many authors have addressed over the last decades (including ^{BALL, 1995}; ^{FAIRCLOUGH, 2001}; ^{BOURDIEU, 1998}; ^{BAUMAN, 2007}). In the field of education, by the late 20th century Ball described the emergence of an educational market which broke the State´s monopoly and decisively marked “the pitch of educational policy in the Western world over the last years” (BALL, 1995, p. 196). One of the consequences of such phenomenon involves a change in the paradigm for education, especially regarding human development and learning: from an education of the entire life towards a lifelong education , so that “the ‘formation’ of the self or of the personality is unthinkable in any manner other than a permanent reformulation” (^{BAUMAN, 2007}, p. 155).

Such changes affect the field of teacher education which, in turn, begins to function under the influence of the market rules. It obtains credibility and strength in discourses and practices that advocate for the central role the teacher plays in the educational task, attaching great responsibility for the quality standard in education (^{NÓVOA, 2013}; ^{SOUZA, 2001}; ^{BELLO, 2013}; ^{SOUZA; SARTI, 2013}). In Brazil, educational reforms undertaken since the 1990´s, funded and supported by international bodies, have contributed to consolidate formative models which soon were appropriated by the market and which have influenced, to this day, the educative practices, both in public and private schooling, in basic and in higher education.

^{Souza and Sarti (2013)}, utilizing Bourdieu´s perspective, emphasize the material and symbolic dimensions the marketing exchanges take within teacher education in Brazil, which potentiate a “transfiguration of the relations of domination” (^{SOUZA; SARTI, 2013}, p. 103) in the educational field. Discourses evoking the central role of the teacher in contemporary school and her/his responsibility for the poor quality of education anchor practices that question the institutional responsibility regarding teacher education, the professional profile and identity of prospective teachers, and also raise ideas and concepts to the category of symbolic goods to be contested and acquired.

But who is in charge of educating teachers for basic schooling in Brazil? The answer to this question is no longer consensual. Nowadays, the debate points to the ambiguous role played by the universities and non-university private institutions in an educational market, highlighting its symbolic dimension and the role performed by the State and its ramifications, as we shall discusses in this paper.

In order to present some thinking around these issues, this article analyzes a proposal of Spanish-language teacher education, the so-called project OYE – Spanish for teachers , announced in 2006 by the Sao Paulo State Department of Education (SEE), in partnership with Santander Bank, Cervantes Institute, and Universia Portal. OYE intended to provide distance training to 45,000 teachers, using an online platform, with the purpose of delivering Spanish classes in the state-run public schools, since the subject was returning to the high-school curriculum, according to Federal Law 11.161/2005 ² . Due to great resistance occurring in more independent circles of the state universities, the project became not only a landmark to evaluate Spanish teaching in Brazil, due to the set of political-linguistic relations it evinces (^{CRUZ, 2016}; ^{MENEZES; CRUZ, 2016}; ^{DEL VALLE; VILLA, 2008}), but also an example of the symbolic market surrounding teacher education in the country.

Thus, when approaching OYE, our question was the place taken by the universities in the project, from the viewpoint of the several agents and institutions involved, since in Brazil higher education institutions are in charge of the basic training of future teachers for basic education, according to the law (BRAZIL, 1996). Once several OYE-related documents were compiled and analyzed from a discursive perspective, we have identified, in the textual references to the universities in those documents, according to ^{Maingueneau (2001)}, material and symbolic social relations which point to a process of symbolic decapitalization of the public universities, conducted by the State, fostering the de-professionalization of teachers in formative model associated with the use of the new technologies, usually untied to higher education practices constructed along the history of teacher education.

What was the project OYE – Spanish for teachers?

In 2005, the National Congress passed Federal Law 11.161, making Spanish as a high-school subject compulsory from 2010 on. This fact stirred the area of studies and research about this language in the country and made room for an expansion of the market related the Spanish language (^{RODRIGUES, 2012}; ^{FANJUL, 2011}; BARROS; COSTA; GALVÃO, 2016). The short deadline to enforce the law had an impact on teacher education. Some proposals of emergency and/or short-length courses became public, with a highlight of OYE – Spanish for teachers. It was an unprecedented project (although it was not entirely carried out), among other elements, due to the institutional design proposed – involving the department of education, state universities, a foreign bank, a Spanish language institute, and a network of universities, operating as a distance training, short-length and projected demand: provide training for 45,000 teachers in four years.

In outline, OYE proposed a 600-hour online course, organized by the Cervantes Institute (IC) and intended for teachers of São Paulo state school system who were working in the classroom, with the aim of qualifying them to teach Spanish. The program included 480 hours of linguistic studies and 120 hours for the methodology to teach Spanish, according to the first version of its Pedagogical Project (SEE, 2006a). The state universities would take part in it by selecting monitors and certifying teachers who completed the course.

The Spanish institutions involved in the project, with an already strong presence in Brazil and in the state of São Paulo, represent the Spanish linguistic policy which invests in the commercial value of the Spanish language in the world (^{DEL VALLE, 2007}; ^{FANJUL, 2011}; ^{LAGARES, 2010}). The Cervantes Institute is one of the educational branches of such policy, funded by Santander Bank, among others, in partnership with Universia, an international network of universities built by means of financial aid to higher education institutions around the world (^{PONTE, 2013}). The Spanish press is another branch of this policy, represented by corporations such as the Prisa Group, which publishes the newspaper El País. At the time, the Spanish press reported OYE as an achievement by Santander and Universia in Brazil (^{CINCO DÍAS, 2006}). Universia, in a news story reported in its website, describes the project as a “magic formula” that was found to provide training to a large number of teachers in four years (UNIVERSIA, 2006).

The boastful tone about the repercussion in the press regarding the Spanish institutions contrasted with the rejection that, little by little, had been forming in the national academic community, especially in relation to the teaching of Spanish in the country. In fact, professors from the University of São Paulo (USP), the São Paulo State University (UNESP) and the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), in addition to APEESP (Association of Spanish Teachers in the State of São Paulo), would soon come forward to publicly rebound OYE, especially for delegating teacher education, a function legally assigned to Brazilian universities and colleges, to foreign institutions alien to the educational field. In addition, the supporting role of universities in designing and implementing OYE was a proof of the state government’s disregard for higher education institutions and their history of and experience in research and teaching Spanish in the country (^{DEL VALLE; VILLA, 2008}; APEESP, 2006a , 2006b, 2006c, 2006d, 2007a).

A resistance movement took shape. Manifestos, open letters, websites were created to mobilize against the project. Within less than 15 days of being announced, under pressure the education department was forced to go public and clarify the matter. According to the state government at the time, OYE would not train Spanish teachers, it would only be a Spanish language course addressed to teachers from public schools, a piece of information that did not match the pedagogical project then disclosed (^{DEL VALLE; VILLA, 2008}). From then on, the continuous pressure from the academic community meant that OYE, although it started as a Spanish language course, did not become a teacher education course. The ambiguities in the practice and in the discourse, however, were permanent. The movement resisting to OYE also managed to organize an Expert Committee (APEESP, 2006d) which, in 2007, after considering the possibility of implementing Law 11.161/05, suggested another model for the emergency course, called FALE (Spanish Language Training and Updating), compliant with the legal parameters in force where the universities were the leading actors (APEESP, 2007b).

Among the various issues raised by the OYE experience, the place given to university institutions caught our attention in the project and the fact that this is an arena of disputes, constantly reflected in the speeches of the various stakeholders. In our master’s research (^{CRUZ, 2016}), we undertook a thorough reading of public texts involving OYE, with the purpose of understanding how each group of actors (universities, state government and Spanish institutions) understood the role and place of state universities in that formative proposal. Below, an analysis is presented which reviewed the documents released by the state education department in an effort to specifically look at the discussion underlying this article: the role of the State in fostering market relations in education, by favoring the participation of private institutions and assigning a merely assisting role to public universities in teacher education.

A discursive reading of the OYE pedagogical project

By choosing to read the texts that compose the OYE project from a discursive perspective, discourse analysis is here understood as a toolbox (^{ARNOUX, 2006}), from which we mobilize concepts that allow to clarify ways of being, of living and of understanding social facts. It is, therefore, a methodological option that enables to comprehend the analyzed object and to confront it with the sociological concepts employed. Thus, the following analysis seeks to identify, by considering the way higher education institutions in Brazil are named, clues that reveal the place they occupy in the OYE Project and, consequently, in the market of teacher education in Brazil. For such, the concept of designation is utilized, as developed by ^{Maingueneau (2001)}, which is defined as the “different ways of presenting the referent in the discourse” (^{MAINGUENEAU, 2001}, p. 179), based on the enunciator’s action, that is, how the speaker calls a particular object or class of objects: “a reference does not result from a wording: it is the enunciator who, through his words, provides the co-enunciator the instructions required to identify the referents targeted by the enunciator in a given context ”(^{MAINGUENEAU, 2001}, p. 179).

By adopting the methodological perspective according to which the discourse is a social practice (^{FAIRCLOUGH, 2001}), that, therefore, can be analyzed as a way to understand how these practices are reproduced and the meanings they acquire socially, the conclusions of the discursive analysis will also be confronted with the OYE´s institutional arrangement, that is, a “set of rules, mechanisms and processes that define the particular way actors and interests are coordinated when a specific public policy is being implemented” (^{GOMIDE; PIRES, 2014}, p. 19-20 ). This concept, borrowed from the area of public policy analysis, will serve as a link between the discourse and the social practice that derives from it: in Bourdieu´s perspective, we will analyze the symbolic relations that OYE allows to clarify, considering the place of the major universities in a wide market of teacher education (^{SOUZA; SARTI, 2013}), as well as the crises affecting the university at the same time (SOUSA ^{SANTOS, 2011}) and causing a “transfiguration of the domination relations in the educational field” (^{SOUZA; SARTI, 2013}, p. 103), pointing to a symbolic decapitalization of the public universities.

The OYE pedagogical proposal

When OYE was launched, several texts were prepared and made public in favor of or against the project by the three groups of stakeholders, namely: the São Paulo State Department of Education (SEE); the state universities and Spanish teachers; and the Spanish institutions involved in it (Santander, Cervantes Institute, Universia ). At this point, we will look into a text that represents the enunciative voice of the education department: OYE´s pedagogical proposal, launched in three different versions (SEE, 2006a, 2006b, 2006c), even if keeping the same structure. The changes found in a text that was not in previous one corresponds to the “need to withdraw the most conflicting aspect of the project, its goal of providing teacher education, and to erase the ties with the universities” (^{FANJUL, 2010}, p. 188). However, these ties remain untouched in the three texts, and this is what is important to analyze here.

In all versions of the document there is a section called Justification , listing the reasons that led SEE to sign the Cooperation Agreement with Spanish institutions, intended to train Spanish teachers. The text starts by addressing the importance of “learning a language”, especially Spanish, in compliance with Law 11.161 / 05, which says that “ the absence of teachers who can meet the demand imposed by the law... is one of major obstacles to be faced ”, which will require “extraordinary actions from the institutions involved”. Or document proceeds:

The panorama of the Spanish teacher education programs in Higher Education Institutions reveals a large gap between the number of teachers who graduate in Spanish and what is considered necessary to be offered, as a language, to students from public schools. (SEE, 2006a, p. 2, emphasis added).

The expression highlighted in the excerpt corresponds to the first explicit mention of this referent that we have identified as being the institutions that, in Brazil, are granted the legal prerogative to train and qualify teachers. The presence of the preposition accompanied by the defined article (“ ‘in’ the Institutions”), before this named group, indicates in its designation a defined description (^{MAINGUENEAU, 2001}, p. 182), that is, a way of describing the object in which features are built by associating it with a specific class of objects. The expression will appear again times in the text, sometimes just as “Institutions”. It is a denomination that creates a class of objects from a generic reference, equalizing objects with what identifies them. Other times the named group “Higher Education Institutions” is resumed in order to break up subgroups, such as, for example, “public [institutions]”, “private institutions”, “universities” - the latter specifically designating USP, UNESP and UFSCar. The word “institution” also comes up naming another object that, at first, does not belong to the group “higher education institutions” or to any of the subgroups mentioned: the Cervantes Institute (C!). According to the OYE justification:

[...] the São Paulo State Department of Education, in partnership with Bank Santander Banespa, signed a Cooperation Agreement on 08/24/2006, whereby the bank will sponsor the access of teachers to a Spanish course entirely remote, developed and taught by the Cervantes Institute, an institution that is a reference in distance education of teachers of Spanish language and culture according to MEC [...] Teachers will participate in a program led by renowned educational institutions , in addition to experiencing the processes of learning in digital environments. (SEE, 2006a, p. 3-4, emphasis added).

In the first sentence highlight in bold, one can see the quote from a statement by the Ministry of Education, according to which CI is a “reference institution”; in addition, the specificity of “distance learning” and “Spanish language and culture”, attributed to the institute, are highlighted as they function as capitals that distinguish and value CI in the eyes of SEE. This justifies the following sentence, in which both “higher education institutions” and CI appear in an equal relationship when identified with adjectives: “teachers will participate in a program of renown educational institutions , in addition to experiencing the learning processes in virtual environments” (SEE, 2006a, p. 4, emphasis added).

Analyzing the Justification (basically the same in the three versions of the Pedagogical Proposal), considering the form of discursive designation of higher education institutions and their specifications (in the perspective of ^{Maingueneau, 2001}), in addition to the reference to the Cervantes Institute, there is a discursive construction of a space of relationships between institutions in which, although a plurality of possible ties is recognized (institutions can be either public or private), an institutional differentiation is not specified to define the functions of institutions in a particular fashion. In other words, there is a designation that dilutes specificities within a complex field of higher education (^{MARTINS, 2000}), that is, a field in which institutions of different ties with the State (public, private, confessional) ³ cohabit. In addition, the ways the Cervantes Institute is named imply equality between CI and the other institutions mentioned, regarding its functions (teacher training), and a difference in relation to the capital CI comes to add to that field: distance and Spanish language training. Three other institutions are openly listed in the section: INEP (National Institute of Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira), Portal Universia and MEC. The first two bring in data to the panorama of higher education portrayed, which legitimizes them as institutions holding a specific capital in the educational field.

From this discursive reading of the text justifying the Pedagogical Proposal OYE (VER, 2006a) and considering the discourse as a social practice (^{FAIRCLOUGH, 2001}), it can be seen that the enunciative voice of the text, representing the internal levels in the Sâo Paulo State Department of Education, which makes use of its symbolical capital to appoint individuals and organizations on behalf of the State (^{BOURDIEU, 2005}, ²⁰¹⁴), discursively builds a space for higher education in which institutional plurality is intended to ensure there is no differentiation between institutions. As a result, bringing institutions into the field of higher education which, deprived of prestige or legal recognition, the discourse makes equal with institutions that have been present in the area for longer: the Cervantes Institute starts to occupy a place equivalent to the public universities´, and the Universia Portal, in symmetry with INEP, stands out and goes beyond the educational sphere in the state of São Paulo, since it takes a parallel position with a federal government body. These institutions, when entering the field, do so already taking a privileged role, side by side with the State, of being co-responsible for public education policies.

Simultaneous to this process, as a result of it, there is a loss or decrease in the status of universities in the institutional arrangement of the OYE project (GOMIDES; PIRES, 2014). In fact, although the first two versions of the Pedagogical Proposal (SEE, 2006a, 2006b) defines, in its Justification, equal allocations between the Spanish institutions and the public universities involved in the project, this rhetorical equality does not correspond to the effective division of responsibilities. In the Methodology section (SEE, 2006a, p. 5), in which the attributions of each institution are described, the universities are merely to perform the task of organizing the module of Spanish Teaching Methodology, in which “knowledge and resources will also be used, to be provided by the Teacher Education Center of Instituto Cervantes” (SEE, 2006a, p. 5). In other words, universities and CI are to share OYE´s training activities. Considering that OYE would have a total workload of 600 hours and that, out of them, universities would be responsible for only 120 hours, together with CI, the universities hold not more than of 20 percent of responsibility for the entire course; the other 80% to be provided by the Spanish institutions involved. The University which was assigned a supporting role is now downgraded to play an “extra” role, which arises from a comment, in the “written version in progress” of the OYE pedagogical project (SEE, 2006a, p. 5):

The Spanish Teaching Methodology Program will be developed by the Universities (Cervantes Institute?) . Knowledge and resources provided by the Teacher Education Center, from the Cervantes Institute, will also be used. (our emphasis)

The portion highlighted in bold corresponds to the original text and is, actually, a comment in parentheses with the name of the “Instituto Cervantes” followed by a question mark. In other words, the enunciating voice is uncertain about the role played by the Universities and the language institute in the project. This wording, still in progress, gives rise, in a text that is supposed to be clear and objective, to an insecure, faltering voice which brings a questioning and a doubt about the role of the University in the project´s institutional arrangement. It should also be mentioned that, although playing a minor role in the OYE teacher´s training, the universities are specifically assigned a specific function: selecting the tutors and monitors in charge of the project. This place does not require from the institutions any of the capitals that distinguish them in the field of higher education, that is, their prestige and scientific and intellectual knowledge and their academic culture (^{SOUZA; SARTI, 2013}; SOUSA ^{SANTOS, 2011}); just to perform the function of staff selection. Officially, therefore, the State, through SEE, deprives universities of their most valuable capital and, eventually, uses only the capital they hold that has no symbolic strength.

Finally, it is worth highlighting the place of universities in the final version of the OYE Pedagogical Proposal. In it, universities maintain their auxiliary role, now called “partner universities involved”, “academic co-managers”, in charge of the “Hispanic-American Culture” module (which replaced the Teaching Methodology module) and the “certification”, that is, to evaluate candidates and the course itself: “The universities involved shall evaluate and suggest changes to the current course, based on the pedagogical experience acquired and along the pilot course” (SEE, 2006c, p. 14). This slightly resumes the recognition of a legitimate didactic-scientific capital held by the universities, but they are still allocated only to certifying function, with no further participation in its development.

Conclusion is that public universities perform the functions of course certification and personnel selection in OYE, which does not require their academic and scientific capitals, confusing them with public agencies, direct spheres of the State bureaucracy, those in charge of carrying out administrative and of issuing certificates. In addition, the legitimacy of the State dilutes the presence of universities within the complex field of higher education, where public and private institutions coexist, undifferentiated as to their specificities and institutional roles. As a result, the Spanish institutions have their path opened as institutions capable of taking part in public actions and policies intended for teacher education in Brazil. The practical and symbolic consequences of this process will be analyzed as follows.

State, university, and the teacher education market

From the moment the relations between market, State and teacher education have been consolidated, the two latter become increasingly dependent on the logic of the former, universities start to occupy an ambiguous place in the education of future teachers. By affirming the need for professional training for elementary teachers, the university emerges as responsible for the task, in a central position in the field (^{BELLO, 2013}; ^{SOUZA; SARTI, 2013}). It would be through “pedagogical knowledge of a scientific nature and in attitudes and values generally associated with an academic-type culture” (SOUZA; SARTI, p. 103), the main responsible for professionalizing teachers. On the other hand, the discourse that anchors this market indirectly questions the university-type education, associated with the alleged excessive emphasis on theoretical knowledge at the expense of practical knowledge.

It is important to see how such ambiguity materializes in the discourse of the São Paulo State Department of Education, in the case of the OYE project. The textual analysis carried out through the reading of its pedagogical project showed that, for SEE, the responsibility for training future teachers is a competence dispersed within a field of undifferentiated higher education institutions, which other institutions can join and take positions, as long as they have capitals deemed legitimate, such as those related to new technologies or specific to a discipline to be introduced in the curriculum. This means that, when discursively building the field of higher education, the official discourse benefits the presence of institutions that historically do not belong to the educational field. The discourse confirms what had already been revealed when the agreement between department of education and the Spanish institutions had been signed: a bureaucratic level of the State introduces, “by the magic of official appointment” (^{BOURDIEU, 2014}, p. 114) and by using its symbolic capital of appointment (^{BOURDIEU, 2005}), Spanish institutions in a place where they would not have had prestige before. In return, it dismisses universities and other higher education institutions from the comfortable dominant place they take, thus directly interfering in the relationships of symbolic domination that are the bearings of the educational field (^{SOUZA; SARTI, 2013}).

Thus, the analysis of the OYE project indicates that the State, through its bureaucratic levels, enhances the three crises the University has been experiencing, as proposed by Sousa ^{Santos (2011)}. By removing control over the teacher education processes from the university, a crisis of hegemony develops furthers, benefitting external solutions into the scientific and academic field when it comes to training manpower to work in public schooling. By denying, even if indirectly, the university’s capacity to train teachers to work in basic education, the legitimacy of higher education institutions, especially the public universities, is called into question by insinuating their alleged detachment from social demands. Finally, the heteronomy generated by the harassment of a wide market focused on teacher education and the teaching of Spanish emphasizes an institutional crisis in the universities, which contributes to exempt the State from investing in public educational policies.

This disengagement of public investment in educational policies supports a process that Sousa ^{Santos (2011)} calls the university’s commodification: on the one hand, the University is decapitalized, that is, its funds from the State are reduced and higher education institutions are encouraged to search for their own revenues; where the solution is a higher education market. On the other hand, it makes room to turn it into a transnational market, as transnational suppliers (CHARLOT; SILVA, 2010) export linguistic, educational and commercial policies for the purpose of taking up positions in markets around the globe.

Indeed, OYE was meant to be an attempt to exempt the government from public investment in teacher education by granting this responsibility to Spanish institutions, legitimized as “renown educational institutions”, holders of economic and symbolic capital (associated with the relationship they had with the Spanish language and the use of technology) necessary to fulfill the task OYE was intended for. This financial decapitalization was followed, therefore, as part of the process, by a symbolic decapitalization of the university: its place in the OYE Project, according to the official discourse, does not require its most valuable capital, associated with its academic culture and scientific practice, and the only reason is in its certifying function on behalf of the State. The symbolic decapitalization of the university, therefore, implies a process by which the State dispenses with the symbolic capital that provides the universities with a distinguished status in the complex field of higher education, making room for private institutions with no history or experience in the educational field or in an educative market to appropriate such capitals and, consequently, empower themselves symbolically.

It is a process that legitimizes financial decapitalization, as it imposes new forces that transfigure the relations of domination in the educational field (^{SOUZA; SARTI, 2013}). It also means pressure on the university to make it turn into a “higher-education management market” (SOUSA ^{SANTOS, 2011}, p. 21), making way to “create non-university systems to provide module-based training” which make higher education shorter and more flexible, laying down a model of “permanent education for the market” (SOUSA ^{SANTOS, 2011}, p. 26).

The symbolic decapitalization of the university is a process that goes hand in hand with its financial decapitalization, making the latter even more justified before society, as well as making higher education market transnational. In addition, it opens up room for other verifiable processes in the teacher education market, such as the idea of “remanufacturing” the teacher, no longer based on “more rational and legitimate practices [...] substantiated on pedagogical knowledge of scientific nature. and in attitudes and values associated with an academic culture” (^{SOUZA; SARTI, 2013}, p. 103), but supported by technical training, associated with new technologies, disconnected from university practices, the construction of teaching autonomy and of intellectual work. It promotes a kind of one-size-fits-all training (^{SILVA, 2015}) that aims to level teachers from different areas and which will, later, provide the education market with the conduction of their professional practice, on behalf of the institutions that invest huge capital in it.

The consequence of the financial and symbolic decapitalization of universities, therefore, regarding teacher education, takes further the de-professionalization of teachers, and its main characteristics are: a) the imposition of new technologies (ICTs) as a form of massification of education, because it shortens, standardizes higher education and makes it more flexible; b) the disconnection from the formative model of university practices, characterized, among other things, by the link between teaching, research and extension; c) the teaching heteronomy in relation to the one´s own education, after all, the consequence of a merely technical and non-critical training is making the professional eternally dependent on external models to be offered by a market organized around this purpose; d) the disconnection between intellectual work and teaching work, since the former relies on a relationship with knowledge in order to overcome the superficiality of the mere “production of things, more precisely products, economically evaluated” (LEOPOLDO; SILVA, 2014, p. 137) , on behalf of critical training for intellectual and professional autonomy.

Closing remarks

The disputes involving OYE highlight the role of the State in fostering market relations in education. With their discourse and practice, the bureaucratic levels of the government of the state of São Paulo helped leverage the symbolic capital of Spanish private companies associated with the marketing management of the language in the world; they deprived higher education institutions of their most valuable capital in the educational field; expanded the capillarity of a cross-border market for university services; and opened space for the de-professionalization of teachers, reversing a movement for professionalization taking place since the 1990s.

There is, therefore, a work of the State’s right hand against its left hand (^{BOURDIEU, 1998}, p. 9). In other words, the dominant tendency of the State is enhancing heteronomy in relation to the market and the presence of its logic increasingly operating in areas of social life ruled by other logics, such as the fields of cultural production in general, and the field of education in particular. By taking the logic of the market, the State ends up imposing its rules and expanding its presence to those fields that revolve around it, which directly depend on the State for its own reproduction. This is achieved by making use of its double regulatory capacity: its legislative and financier powers (^{BOURDIEU, 2005}).

However, as the “left hand” of the State is a remnant of the past social struggles (^{BOURDIEU, 1998}, p. 10), it is also its role, as “lower nobility of the State”, to rise up against the upper nobility, represented by the powers that give the marketing orientation to the actions of the State. In the case of OYE, one should not forget the resistance ⁴ undertaken, mainly by the agents of São Paulo state universities, which prevented the project from being carried out effectively as planned.

Firstly, institutional measures at USP and lawsuits were proposed to prevent the university from signing the agreement with the Spanish institutions. Then, a commission of specialists in Spanish teaching and teacher education was created, with the purpose of recovering its position and the scientific and academic capitals that had been denied by the State to the universities. At the same time, university agents sought to provide the issue with visibility towards society and the media, in order to resume higher education institutions´ role in teacher education, as well to reclaim it as a subject of broader social and political interest. In addition, they regained control over the São Paulo State Spanish Teachers Association (APEESP), which gave Spanish teachers the strength to mobilize against OYE and subsequent struggles, within the field of the Spanish language as a discipline.

The strategies used against OYE indicate a path of resistance within the State itself which includes making way for a discursive struggle, where the false consensus generated by the market discourse in education is publicly challenged; the universalization of the issues it advocates for, that is, the dialogue with society, beyond the institutional walls of the universities, in terms of interests focused on citizenship and the preservation of social rights; the proposition of alternatives, which imply resuming the distinctive capital held by the competing institutions, leading a dialogue between the State and the universities and between the State and society.

All of these strategies were carried out within the context in which the struggles around OYE took place. When revisiting them it is important to consider the different context we live in today, 13 years after the events reported here. However, as the tendency towards the commodification of the university and life now remains and gets stronger, revisiting the OYE project and what it meant can be a good way to think about strategies for fighting within the State spheres against its own self-destruction and for the preservation of social conquests, resulting from social struggles of the past and the present.