Introduction

Educational reforms and pedagogical practices in Brazil are currently and increasingly guided by the market logic. As a process that is not only objective but also subjective and normative, the market now rules our lifestyles and behavior patterns on the whole. In the field of education, the entrepreneurial mindset steps into the institutions, from basic education to higher education as a result of educational policies and programs and/or projects devised and developed by institutions of the Third Sector, S System ⁴ , and also as private businesses and foundations.

The objective of this study is to analyze the rationality and the assumptions that preside over such entrepreneurial culture, as it has molded the educational institutions and policies in Brazil. Analyzing the entrepreneurial pedagogy plays a key role with the purpose of utilizing the school device to spread the entrepreneurial mindset throughout society. It also includes the analysis of public-private partnerships which capitalize on the entrepreneurial pedagogy to educate enterprising children and youths.

For the issues developed in this article, with essayistic tone, we selected a set of materials with the purpose of discussing the proliferation of entrepreneurship in Basic Education. For such, we relied on a variety of studies addressing the subject; on excerpts from two classical books by Fernando Dolabela: Pedagogia Empreendedora ⁵ (DOLABELA, 2003a) and Empreendedorismo, uma forma de ser ⁶ (DOLABELA, 2003b); on an article called Fazendo revolução no Brasil: a introdução da pedagogia empreendedora nos estágios iniciais da educação ⁷ (^{DOLABELA; FILION, 2013}); and on the mapping of some programs developed in Brazil focusing on the education of entrepreneurial children and youths. As mentioned before, our intent here was not to map, circumscribe and analyze the totality of studies and programs on entrepreneurial education, because we realized that would not be possible. But, as says ^{Ball (2014)}, the participations and new voices within the discourses of policies are multifaceted, and the ways the various actors within the educational field are not the same; therefore, the objective here is not to map the networks from which entrepreneurship stems. In our analysis, we start off with some examples and two assumptions: 1) the materials we have selected express a given conception of education which has guided many interventions and partnerships between schools and the private sector; 2) the formulations that move around them produce an “truth effect” in the school´s everyday life (^{FOUCAULT, 2018}), whose aim it to naturalize a certain view of education and reduce the space for alternative conceptions.

In a study on the partnerships between schools/businesses/Other organizations and eight Local Education Authorities and three Coordination Offices in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, we found that most projects and programs developed by public-private partnerships in the school from this region focused on educating children and youths to be have an entrepreneurial behavior. The main proposers of projects/programa include Junior Achievement (JA) and the Brazilian Service of Support to Micro and Small Businesses (Sebrae) – which, in this article, are the two cases selected to complement and exemplify the analysis of the entrepreneurial pedagogy. Moreover, we present some of the programs developed by sponsors and supporters of the Movement All in Favor of Education ⁸ in the area of education of entrepreneurial children and youths, and some of the studies on the topic in Brazil.

To present these analyses, we have divided the article in three parts: in the first part, we reported a brief history of the entrepreneur and the entrepreneurial culture, highlighting their increasing importance in going from the Keynesian social capitalism to neoliberal capitalism; in the second part, we discussed the idea of market as a learning process and its connection with the entrepreneurial pedagogy, which displaces the focus of the educational process towards developing competencies in the customer-student; finally, the third part analyzes the articulation between entrepreneurship as a normative model of conduct and the new forms of life management, pointing out the consequences, the risks and the weaknesses entailed by the educational model, founded on the neoliberal rationality.

Capitalism, subjectivation, and entrepreneurial culture

The appreciation of the entrepreneur and the entrepreneurial culture begins in the early times of industrial capitalism. In 1803, in his “Treaty of Political Economy”, French economist Jean-Baptiste Say emphasized the importance entrepreneurs held in the modern industry: “O industrial entrepreneur is the main agent of production. Other operations are indispensable to create products, but it is the entrepreneur who implement them, gives them a useful drive, and draws value from them.” (SAY, 1848 apud^{DARDOT; LAVAL, 2016}, p. 152). As Say saw it, the entrepreneur is the one who intermediates the specialist producer of knowledge and the manual worker who does the project. Holder of virtues such as correct judgment, practical sense, boldness, and determination, the success of the companies and the nation´s prosperity depends on him.

Examples of great businessmen who created actual commercial empires since the late 19th century, as John D. Rockfeller and Andrew Carnegie, led Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter to theorize the central role played by an entrepreneur for economic development. Schumpeter is considered the first author to devise a theory of entrepreneurship (^{LOPEZ-RUIZ, 2007}, p. 112-135). In his work, the entrepreneur is seen as an innovator who drives the process of “creative destruction”, which the economic progress depends on. As ^{Schumpeter (2017)} sees it, an entrepreneur is not to be confused with the capital owner nor the business manager. He is the individual who innovates by recombining the production factors in unprecedented ways, inventing new techniques, new forms of organizing the productive process, finding new sources of raw materials, or opening up new markets. Due to the tendency of decreased profit rates – which, for Schumpeter, is inherent to the capitalist economy –, the actions by the innovating-entrepreneur would be essential because it boosts the only way of bypassing this tendency, namely, the constant rise in the productivity of work as a result of ongoing innovation.

Authors from the Austrian liberal school granted entrepreneurial culture a new dimension. For Ludwig von ^{Mises (2010)} and Friedrich A. ^{Hayek (1978)}, entrepreneurship is the most crucial principle for the functioning of the capitalist order. Unlike Schumpeter´s perspective, the entrepreneur is no longer seen by them as an exceptional and creative character that rules the economic process, as a conductor leads an orchestra. Everyone has within themselves an entrepreneurial potential, which would be only waiting for the perfect occasion to come up. These occasions would be given by the market, which plays a formative role towards the entrepreneurial subject, teaching he or she to behave rationally when submitted to situations of competition. Thus, the entrepreneur is seen by Mises and Hayek as the one who is not afraid of venturing in the game of competition and learns to use the information available to seek better opportunities of gain and personal fulfillment in a competing market.

The Austrian neoliberal authors mentioned above highlight the importance of the subjective element in the economic process. For them, the economy is based on the individual´s ability to choose rather than on maximizing the interest of the agents. Free choice stemming from appropriate information would be the very condition for the competitive markets to operate. Consequently, any intervention by the State on the economy would be harmful because it distorts the information and twists the free game of competition. In the view of the Austrian neoliberal thinkers and their intellectual heirs in the School of Chicago (Israel Kirzner, Milton Friedman, Gary Becker etc.), only market-oriented economy is capable of stimulating and giving free rein to the entrepreneurial spirit that every man brings within (^{DARDOT and LAVAL, 2016}).

Accordingly, entrepreneurship is no longer a set of virtues that only great businessmen have and is now seen as a behavior model applicable to all, so that it should be pursued not only in business but in all aspects of life.

The spread of this model of the entrepreneurial subject occurred concomitantly with the structural change of the economy and the State from the 1980´s on. The advent of the new economy, through the convergence of the technological revolution and globalization, transformed the structure of the organizations. Companies in the Golden period of Keynesian capitalism (1930-1960) where hierarchical and pyramidal structures, organized in a strict and centralized fashion. Workers, in this kind of organization, usually made a career in a single institution, climbing every step of the internal hierarchy, frequently enjoying the assurance of a lifelong job. In this context, strong ties of solidarity were formed within the working groups as well as loyal relations towards the institution. Additionally, the high taxes collected by the State allowed to finance the social security system, ensuring a series of benefits and guarantees, at least among the most industrialized Western economies.

Digital and communication technologies allowed the new organizations to be more flexible and less hierarchical, so that the production processes became fragmented and entire internal areas of the productive chain were outsourced using countries that offered qualified workforce for much lower salaries. In this respect, legislative and institutional changes arising from the neoliberal governments of Reagan in the US and Thatcher in Great Britain, generalized the flexible employment contracts (temporary, home, intermittent or part-time jobs) and lowered the State´s investment in programs and mechanisms of social security. These changes led to an increased competitiveness among the corporations; to social fragmentation and weakened trade unions; to the individualization of performance in the companies, and to the blurring the line dividing private life and professional life (^{SENNETT, 2008}).

In this context, the welfare state was accused by the new American and European right of fostering bureaucratic structures that were expensive, inefficient and paternalistic, which encouraged passivity and dependency in the citizens. Instead, there was the spread of the “entrepreneurial culture”, founded on the neoliberal economic ideas and on the management theories, which seek to stimulate individuals to be autonomous, active, equipped with power of choice. From the 1970´s and 1980´s on, the management theories would increasingly emphasize values such entrepreneurship, autonomy and innovation as the bases for the rise of a “new spirit of capitalism”, based on more flexible organizations and on networked horizontal working groups (^{BOLTANSKI; CHIAPELLO, 2009}). In the new economy, adopting a proactive, independent, and entrepreneurial behavior is seen by management theorists as essential for success, for productivity and competitiveness of he organizations. Peter Drucker, for instance, sees the entrepreneur as someone who is not afraid of change, who is capable of rapidly adapt to new scenarios and knows how to explore the opportunities available to create and innovate. Drucker foresees the advent of a new affluent and dynamic society through the large-scale spread of the entrepreneurial culture (DRUCKER, 2012).

The school, the institution that is fundamental to educate and produce subjectivity, is one of the privileged means selected to fabricate this new subject and disseminate the entrepreneurial culture in society at large (^{LAVAL, 2004}). Several institutions as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have developed over the last decades a series of programs and initiatives to transform the educational system and turn the “spirit of entrepreneurship” into an important element in the school curricula and programs.

Market, learning, and entrepreneurial pedagogy

Reformist discourses aligned with the neoliberal economic rationality and with the entrepreneurial imperative have intensely directed the contemporary educational agenda. A great deal of such discourses deal with the need to educate children and young people for the 21st-century economy, which requires to form subjects capable of actively participating in the logic of competition, put into circulation based on a new conception of market as “a process of discovery and learning that modifies the subjects, adjusting them to each other” (^{DARDOT; LAVAL, 2016}, p. 139).

Despite being often understood, in a simplified way, a static and immutable data, the concept of market has changed along the history of capitalism (^{ROSANVALLON, 2002}). In the classical liberalism, the market traced back to a “natural” environment, through which goods circulated and exchanges were conducted between the economic agents. In the neoliberal economic rationality instead, the market is a changing reality and designates not a natural milieu but rather a process with objective and subjective dimensions, whose coordination is complex and utilizes specific skills and psychological motivations from the agents involved. Thus, the market is no longer defined as a self-regulating process (that is, leading to the perfect balance among the economic forces) and becomes a self-creating momentum, that it, it is capable of self-generating itself in time by means of the subjects´ actions. In this regard, Dardot and Laval are correct in highlighting the subjective and formative element of the market in the neoliberal rationality, which may be defined as “a subjective, self-educating and self-disciplining process through which the individual learns how to conduct themselves” (^{DARDOT; LAVAL, 2016}, p. 140).

The market would then be the device that induces the self-formation of economic agents – self-formation understood as the capacity of “learning to learn” –, which is fostered by combining a set of production practices of “an active subject, a learning subject, such individual who, due to his/her own experience, his/her own activity, learn what they need to live and be happy” (^{MARÍN-DÍAZ, 2015}, p. 203).

This view of the market as an active and dynamic learning process is reflected in a series of educational policies and documents over the last decades. In the “Report for UNESCO by the International Commission on Education in the 21st century” (known as the Delors Report), the four pillars of education – “learning to know”, “learning to do”, “learning to live with others”, and “learning to be” – are associated with the change in the emphasis on the notion of qualification towards the notion of competence, resulting from the de-materialization and flexibilization of labor, as well as from the increasing importance of services among the salaried activities (DELORS, 2012). In the Delors Report, the concept of learning is put in the center of educational process with the purpose of enhancing self-formation and self-conduct of economic agents who must become self-regulated subjects. According to Delors, “there is an issue shared by both the developed and the developing countries: how to learn to behave effectively in a situation of uncertainty; how to participate in creating the future?” (DELORS, 2012, p. 78). Accordingly, the knowledge that every individual has and heir capacity to readapt – “learning to learn” – makes it possible to deal with the uncertainties and instabilities that are typical of the new neoliberal rationality ⁹ .

The school as a privileged ambience for the formation of children and youths is constantly engaged based on the do imperative of permanent learning needed by the market, fulfilling the role of booster in developing competences for the 21st-century economy. Businessmen, economists, professionals in the area of Management and Business, all in all, identify in the school a fruitful space to develop an entrepreneurial subject, as highlighted by ^{Dardot and Laval (2016)},

[...] if the market is a learning process, if learning is a fundamental factor in the subjective market process, the job of education done by economists may and must contribute to speed up this self-formation of the subject. The corporate culture and the spirit of entrepreneurship may early be learned at the school, in the same way as the advantages of capitalism over any other kind of economic organization. The ideological combat is an integral part of the good functioning of the machinery. (^{DARDOT; LAVAL, 2016}, p. 150-151).

Thereby, preparing students to be entrepreneurs in all areas of their lives and in any activities they choose to perform (^{DOLABELA, 2018}), one of the fundamentals of the entrepreneurial pedagogy ¹⁰ , echoes in the educational programs, especially in Brazil, which, as say ^{Dolabela and Filion (2013}, p. 154-155) “faces an enormous need for entrepreneurial education to allow a great proportion of its human capital to develop its entrepreneurial potential”. If an entrepreneurial education is not adopted, the authors add, “large segments of society will be denied the opportunity to generate income and experience self-fulfillment”. (^{DOLABELA; FILION, 2013}, p. 154-155). According to such perspective, rather than a way of taking oneself as a business company and a means of ensuring income to provide for the basic needs and avoid unemployment, through entrepreneurship the individual will achieve objectives such as self-fulfillment, personal satisfaction, and material welfare. Therefore, entrepreneurial pedagogy

[...] unties the concept of the entrepreneur of a specific activity and links it to a way of being – something related to the lifestyle, worldview, leadership, innovation, capacity to implement changes in him/herself and in the environment, means and ways of seeking self-fulfillment, including patterns of reaction in the face of ambiguities and uncertainties. (DOLABELA, 2003a, p. 37).

Pedagogical activities, in this case, “will be dedicated mainly to connect dream and its achievement”. (DOLABELA, 2003a, p. 55) The objective is to “encourage and prepare student to dream”; he or she “develops a dream, a future to which she or he wishes to reach or to be”. (DOLABELA, 2003a, p. 55) To make this dream true, he or she “sees him/herself motivated to learn whatever is necessary for this objective”. (DOLABELA, 2003a, p. 55) Consequently, in order to make their dream true,

The student is encouraged to generate knowledge about him/herself, about what he/she wishes to achieve in the future and how to devise the ways to do it. Therefore, the student is the author of him/herself and learns, as does the actual entrepreneur, to seek the knowledge required to fulfill his/her dream. By building his/her own self-perception the student becomes aware of his/her limitation and gets ready to construct complementarities, attracting competences and people to do what he or she does not want, cannot, or does not know how to do. (^{DOLABELA; FILION, 2013}, p. 157).

Therefore, entrepreneurial pedagogy moves the focus on the educational process from teaching to learning and, accordingly, underlines the student being the key player, seen as a “customer”, so the emphasis is not on the teacher´s work (^{BIESTA, 2018}). The idea is that “the learning situation is no longer ensured by the transmission of knowledge by the teacher, but is rather supported on the operation that each youth is able to perform with the tools he or she has” (^{SIBILIA, 2012}, p. 125). The sense of learning, in this regard, is in the learner who is displace from the position of a student who learns something taught by someone – in the case here, the teacher – towards the “key player of his/her own destiny”. (^{DOLABELA; FILION, 2013}, p. 136-13). Furthermore, being one own´s key player is boosted by individual dreams as they “require projective thinking that allows people to become more organized, able to identify clearly what they need to learn” (^{DOLABELA; FILION, 2013}, p. 141).

Thus, it is not about the student learning something as a result of a teacher´s pedagogical work, what is at stake in the entrepreneurial pedagogy is what the individual does onto him/herself to develop their capacity of improving and playing a prominent role while seeking self-fulfillment. Therefore, everyone is accountable for developing the skills required to “transform their dreams into reality” (^{DOLABELA; FILION, 2013}, p. 135) and become a corporate-individual who is successful in business and in life. The structuring dream, referred to in the entrepreneurial theory of dreams, provides “a life plan with origin and organization by synergically combining desires, worldview, values, competences, preferences, self-esteem” (DOLABELA, 2003a, p. 38).

In this sense, what matters in the educational process mobilized by the entrepreneurial pedagogy is developing individual characteristics such as creativity, initiative, ability to resolve problems, capacity to adapt, reflection, flexibility, exercises of responsibility, and the ability to learn. In summary, the corporate- individual needs to learn to develop certain dispositions and attitudes, behavioral values and capacity for action – it is the idea of competences that is stressed out in the process. Thus, the school as a space where everybody is precociously socialized and their subjective dimension is worked on, becomes a powerful space disseminate an entrepreneurial subjectivity. Consequently, it becomes increasingly common to adopt programs and projects devised and maintained by private companies and third-sector organizations, intended to implement and develop the entrepreneurial pedagogy in basic education schools.

Business management of education as a strategy to disseminate entrepreneurial culture

As mentioned in the introduction to this essay, we will present as follows some research data related to school/company partnerships focusing on the education of children and young entrepreneurs. Our purpose is not to present the whole range of programs dealing with the topic, especially because several network actions of this nature unfold into others and so on successively. As says ^{Ball (2014)}, “political networks are a kind of new ‘social’, involving specific types of social relations, of flows and movements”. (^{BALL, 2014}, p. 29). We have not traced back here the flows with the intent of mapping a network of actions. Our purpose was to bring in some examples, since the topic of entrepreneurship, all in all, is connected with the entrepreneurial mindset that is characteristic of the time we are living in.

For the discussion undertaken, a survey of academic studies was conducted , available at the Theses and Dissertations Bank of CAPES, from 2015 through 2019, by using the descriptor “entrepreneurship in education”. The response gathered more than 80,000 works. Out of them, we discarded those that were not related to practices developed in Basic Education. Reading the abstracts led to a set of 13 PhD theses and Master dissertations who manner of addressing the topic of entrepreneurship in education was of interest for the issues covered by this essay. The works we have reviewed included 11 advocating for the spread of entrepreneurial pedagogy in Basic Education – which reinforces our considerations regarding the normative model already mentioned.

In a study conducted by ^{Klaus (2018)} about the partnerships set with schools/companies/other organizations by eight Local Education Authorities and three Educational Coordinating Offices in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, we found that most projects and programs developed by the partners focused on the education of children and young entrepreneurs. The major proponents of projects/programs included Junior Achievement (JA) and Sebrae . In the case of Junior Achievement , whose mission is to “inspire and prepare young people to be successful in a globalized economy” (JA BRASIL, [2018?]), the number of children and youths covered by the Programs from 2010 through 2013 – 4 years – was quite close to the number achieved from 1984 through 2009 – the 25 previous years –, resulting in an increase of approximately 477 percent of children and youths involved in the projects. In their view, Junior Achievement intends to “be partner of companies, teachers and public managers from all over the world who seek to expand the education of young people and economic development” (JA BRASIL, [2018?]).

An overall analysis allows to say that the programs conducted by JA have the following objectives: prepare young people for their transition into the labor market, enable them to manage their own lives and develop the “entrepreneurial spirit”, which is reflected in the ways their lives are conducted. According to ^{López-Ruiz (2007}, p. 30) “entrepreneurship became the attitude of a nation , the attitude that is expected from a nation”; that is why

[...] “You Corp.”, cannot be only you. Several you´s are needed, individual individuals – and therefore the need for a configuration as the ensemble individualism to establish the ties among them – which take the deep commitment towards themselves, towards the investments done, towards their human capital, towards their company. (^{LÓPEZ-RUIZ, 2007}, p. 262).

The JA website expresses in numbers the proliferation of entrepreneurial education in basic education schools in Brazil. The total number of students, schools and volunteers reached by the JA programs in three years, from 2010 through 2013, more than doubled if compared to the total numbers of the previous 25 years, from 1984 through 2009. In the interstice from 2010 to 2013, JA had been present in 8,861 school; from those institutions, 1,440,378 students participated in entrepreneurship programs, which counted on 50,619 volunteers (JA BRASIL, [2018?]). These figures correspond to 73 percent of the number of schools, 76 percent of the total students, and 71 percent of the volunteers accumulated ¹¹ who took part in entrepreneurial education programs conducted by JA.

In the case of SEBRAE, the number of individuals included in the programs associated with the education of children and young entrepreneurs is also remarkable. Up to 2015, for example, 170,000 students were served by Entrepreneur Pronatec Program ¹² , and 600,000 people were covered by the Young Entrepreneurs Program – First Steps ¹³ (SEBRAE, 2021a).

Among sponsors and supporters of the Movement All for Education , some projects and actions are found whose intent is to spread the culture of entrepreneurship in Basic Education. They include, namely: Foundation Telefônica Vivo, with the Program “Think Big”; the Natura Institute in partnership with Foundation Telefônica Vivo and Educational Innovation Laboratory (LABI), which altogether conduct the Program “Innovate School: Practices for whoever wants to innovate education”; the Caixa Foundation, with the Program “Young entrepreneurs”; and Foundation Educate DPaschoal, with the Program “Academy Educate”.

It was exactly this significant increase of programs intended to spread entrepreneurship that mobilized us, as researchers, to problematize the and importance and the normative assumptions of the entrepreneurial pedagogy, which

[...] takes the entrepreneurs as someone capable of generating news knowledge based on a given platform, made up by ‘areas of knowledge’ accumulated in life history of an individual and which are called ‘the four pillars of education. (DOLABELA, 2003a, p. 26).

For Dolabela, the entrepreneurial behavior is a cyclical process of formation with constant feedback and which requires from the individual the capacity to permanently transform and readapt him/herself:

Enterprising business is essentially a process of proactive learning, in which the individual constructs and reconstructs cyclically his/her representation of the world, modifying him/herself and his/her dream of self-fulfillment in a permanent process of self-evaluation and self-creation. (DOLABELA, 2003a, p. 32).

Exactly because developing an entrepreneurial attitude is a continuous process, as neoliberal economists and theorists of management mentioned above had already pointed out, so that entrepreneurship can be a mass phenomenon (^{DARDOT; LAVAL, 2016}; ^{LÓPEZ-RUIZ, 2007}), individuals must develop entrepreneurial competences since their childhood. That is what justifies and legitimates the partnerships with schools and the strategy of funding programs intended for children, teenagers and young people. The proposal is genuine model of subjectivity endowed with a strong normative nature, which aims to allow new forms of management and government of the individuals. As advocated by neoliberal rationality, subjects must be governed not by means of external coercion, by rather by their own capacity of self-regulating and self-conducting themselves.

In the next section, we analyze how this normative model became a real imperative that defines the modes of subjectivation – that is, the relation with oneself and with the others – in contemporary societies.

The enterprising individual as a normative model and a way of government

In the discussion we have conducted so far, we have sought to point out how the imperative of entrepreneurship goes beyond the walls of the corporate companies and produces new forms of being in the world. More specifically, the vocabulary of entrepreneurship, according to ^{Rose (1998)},

[...] not only designates a type of organizational form[...], but also, in a broader way, provides an image of a type of activity to be encouraged in many contexts of life – the school, the university, the hospital, clinical offices in general, the factory and the structures of social welfare. (^{ROSE, 1998}, p. 214).

Today, the entrepreneur became a model of subjectivity ubiquitous in the contemporary societies. The individual is called to act on him/herself in order to improve, to adapt and transform themselves continuously, acquiring competences and skills that will allow them to be appreciate as human capital and to make their dreams and aspirations come true. The enterprising individual is seen, at the same time, as both provider and administrator of this capital, taking the risks intrinsic to the management of any capital. Thus, this person must develop and demonstrate in their everyday life qualities such as autonomy, flexibility, responsibility, creativity, innovation, and self-effectiveness. In the new configuration of subjectivity, as shows ^{Bröckling (2016)}, the imperative of entrepreneurship becomes an actual force field that governs life, informs one´s thinking, and guides one´s behavior:

The Call to act as an entrepreneur of one´s own life produces a model so that people can understand what they are and what they should be and tells them how to work on oneself in order to become what they must be. In other words, the enterprising self is a form of subjectivation. As such, the entrepreneurial activity is less a fact than a force field. It is a goal through which individuals fight, a measure according to which they judge their conduct, a daily exercise to work on the self and, finally, a truth generator by means of which they they get to know themselves. (^{BRÖCKLING, 2016}, p. viii).

The entrepreneurial subject is the one who turns his or her entire life into an enterprise, seeking to maximize their own human capital to consciously project their future and become what they wish to be (^{FOUCAULT, 2004}; ^{GADELHA, 2009}). A normative behavior model is created which becomes the base of a new way of regulating the conducts. As demonstrates ^{Bröckling (2016)}, the entrepreneur cannot be seen as an individual who is ready, finished, but rather as a being that is always in the making, in an ever-changing state. In the new way of governing conducts, the objective is no longer to discipline, instruct, or moralize, but to incite and manage the enterprising spirit of the individuals, in order to ensure maximum productivity, permanent innovation, and global competitiveness.

In the neoliberal rationality, individuals must be governed by means of their own liberty and their aspirations to values such as success, happiness, self-fulfillment and quality of life. For such, the corporate-individual must be forced to choose and to take responsibility for his or her choices.

The corporate-individual, therefore, is not a descriptive concept, but a normative and prescriptive concept. It does not describe what the subject is, but into what she or he must be converted in order to go on participating in the economic competition and the social game. Adopting an entrepreneurial attitude towards life is seen as the condition to participate not only in the labor market but in all spheres of social life. This way, the entrepreneur of oneself is not only the one who manages his or her investments in education and their career as it was a business, but also the one who faces their family life, their relationship with the community and their citizenship as enterprises or parts of an enterprise.

The objective of the entrepreneurial pedagogy is precisely to condition individuals since their childhood to conceive themselves and to behave in accordance with such normative model. In this sense, the entrepreneurial pedagogy requires a radical individualization of the pedagogical practices and objectives, resulting in the loss of any dimension of solidarity and perspective of citizenry, to the extent that the citizen cannot be only the person who lives for their own private world, for their particular aspirations and dreams: she or he must be the person who participates in the public sphere and in the “common world”, without which citizenship and democracy would not be possible (^{ARENDT, 2014}).

The loss of citizenship also involves a series of risks for the individual who is called to behave and conduct him/herself as a corporate business. In the neoliberal government of the conducts, citizenship is no longer thought on the basis of social solidarity and is now seen in accordance with the consumer´s behavior, who uses his/her power to choose in the face of a diversity of options available – the corporate-individual establishes and affirms him/herself through acts of consumption. However, the type of investment she or he does in leading their own life is different from the act of purchasing a commodity, as this investment is a decision with long-term consequences that need to be carefully weighed up and whose success depends on the active participation of the individual over time. In this respect, the corporate-individual must make choices concerning his or her present and future well-being, based on a “actuarial rationality”, according to which they have to calculate the need for and the risks of the investment per se, in critical moments of their lives (^{PETERS, 2001}, ²⁰⁰⁵).

Thus, in the view of the entrepreneurial pedagogy, the student who finishes high-school must consider the perspectives of future appreciation of a profession before choosing a higher-education degree. Accordingly, a professional who is employed has to pursue constant retraining in order to keep their worth in the labor market, or, in case of losing their job, they must consider investing in some other line of education, or obtain a graduate degree, in order to ensure a re-entry in the labor market. In short, a space of regulated freedom is formed in which a “remote government” becomes possible by making regulated and responsible choices by agents who are autonomous and enterprising (^{ROSE, 2012}).

This logic of taking responsibility on an individual basis and in denying the collective dimension of education, however, no matter how much the individual makes great efforts to learn, to adapt, and to model him or herself, does not absolutely ensure that she or he will reap the fruits of success as no amount of effort is enough to exorcise the risk of failure. The enterprising individual must take responsibility for their choices and become the broker who calculates the risks of investing in oneself. In line with German sociologist Ulrich Beck, it is possible to talk about the rise of an actual “risk society”, in which the individual becomes the agent, the planner and the director of their own life (BECK, 2010). The risk is privatized and social problems such as inequality and unemployment are deemed as the inability of individuals to be entrepreneurs and to learn from their experiences in order to rationally plan their own future. Thus, the “contradictions of social inequality emerge again as contradictions between moment of life within a biography”, at the same time in which the “provisional nature covering unemployment is the metamorphosis of external causality into one´s own blame, of systemic problems into personal failure ” (^{BECK, 2010}, p. 139, original emphasis).

The new techniques of educational management, such as accountability, the individualization of performance, demand for achieving goals and permanent audit by means of large-scale assessments are utilized to allow for the calculation, monitoring, control, and assessment of the organizations and behaviors, with the purpose of making risk and insecurity manageable. In the risk society, individuals need to be autonomous and enterprising in order to be managed. Everybody must remain in movement constantly, learn to take advantage of the opportunities, and continuously invest in themselves to appreciate their human capital and make their life projects come true. Consequently, in the neoliberal rationality, as a result of the State having its role reconfigured – it is no longer for assistance and “paternalistic” –, the individual is then the sole responsible for his/her success or failure.

Therefore, the enterprising individual is exposed to a series of social risks that may brutally affect his/her material life standard, her/his position in society and even his/her relationship with themselves: the flexibilization of social rights and decrease in the mechanisms of social protection lead to higher levels of inequality and make life increasing precarious. Thus, the logic of individualization of responsibility leads to increased social vulnerability (^{CARAHER; REUTER, 2017}).

Moreover, increasing unemployment of skilled workers and holders of higher-education diplomas makes us question the link established by the human capital theories between schooling, productivity, competitiveness, and income (^{DOWN, 2009}). This fact shows that, frequently, the investment the corporate-individual makes in him/herself does not yield the expected results. It should also be stressed that not everyone has the social and psychic conditions required to win the game of individualized competition. In this respect, precarious and degraded conditions of employment, due to “uberization” of the economy (^{SLEE, 2017}), puts the very normative value of the corporate-individual model in a tight spot.

In the face of the chronically dysfunctional nature of financial capitalism, evinced after the 2008 global crisis, the corporate-individual then turns out to be a fragile normative ideal because in practice it is unattainable. The logic of individual accountability generates distress, anxiety, stress, and a series of other pathologies (^{HAN, 2015}). In this context of a society of individualized risk, the factory of the neoliberal subject converts problems of the social and economic system into individual responsibilities (^{BECK, 2010}; ^{DARDOT; LAVAL, 2016}). In other words, all costs of the system being dysfunctional are transformed into the individual´s burden.

Final remarks

Understood as a normativo model increasing spread in the contemporary societies, adopting an entrepreneurial attitude is no longer an option as it becomes necessary for the various spheres of life, both professional, social and economic. In this respect, the sooner investments are made to “develop the entrepreneurial capacity” (DOLABELA, 2003a, p. 55) of an individual, greater are the chances of maximizing his/her human capital and transforming his/her life into a great enterprise that will lead him/her to what is desired (^{ROSE, 1998}).

Such understanding strengthens and disseminates the idea that “one of the most powerful means to develop entrepreneurship in a society is by utilizing educational programs” (^{DOLABELA; FILION, 2013}, p. 135). More than that, the neoliberal rationality has an interest in eliminating all and every inflexibility – including psychological inflexibility –, and this affects a lot of institutions, including the school (^{LAVAL, 2004}). Therefore, it no surprise that spreading programs intended to disseminate entrepreneurship in schooled education and praising the principle of entrepreneurial pedagogy in a variety of social environments.

Naturally, in the entrepreneurial pedagogy, formation becomes a function assigned to the student who must take responsibility for his/her own learning. Learning on a permanent basis is part of the entrepreneurial spirit (^{BALL, 2013}), and this requires the attitude of being a learner in every space and throughout the different cycles of life. In this case, more than learning contents, purposes and relations (^{BIESTA, 2018}), the point is to develop a set of skills, “learn to know”, “learn to do”, “learn to live together”, and “learn to be” (^{DELORS, 2012}).

According to the normative behavioral model, which is assumed by the entrepreneurial pedagogy and is the ground from the interventions by the private sector in education, developing the ability to keep oneself in a constant process of learning becomes one of the conditions for the individual to be employable and retaining the conditions of employability in the future. More than that, such posture is fundamental not only for the individual to learn how to be flexible and adapt to the different situations he or she will have to face, but also to able to make their dreams come true and materialize their life projects.

This model, however, as we have attempted to demonstrate, has precisely in it its greatest weakness. Not all are capable of keeping up with such unattainable behavior norm, and many will see their dreams go wreck in their school and professional failure, as well as in the subsequent precariousness of their lives. With this in mind, focusing on the student´s ingenuity and on the individual accountability yields social fragmentation, undermines the structures of citizenship and mechanisms of collective solidarity. Therefore, it brutally increases the individual vulnerability and the social risks, especially for those under socioeconomic disadvantage. Consequently, this model is not fit to envisage a fairer society and a more inclusive society – understood as the common good and not as a private investment in human capital. We understand that, although the adequacy of the lifestyles that are currently imposed is necessary, it is important to keep the school as a collective space and time of citizenship and equality and not as a factory of neoliberal subjectivities for the new economy.