Initial considerations

The presence of private and philanthropic entities in the direction and execution of public education has been identified and debated intensely for at least three decades in Brazil. Academic research, aimed at investigating movements that promote managerial prescriptions in (and through) education offered by the State, is extensive but still necessary so that the processes that update and amplify the performance of collective subjects linked to the market in the public educational institutes can be understood. Concentrating around 80% of students in the country (G1, ²⁰²⁰), this space is conceived as useful not only for the commercialization of teacher training courses, teaching platforms, and didactic-pedagogical materials but as a pleasant place for the development of values, behaviors, and skills that favor a particular education, articulated to business desires.

The curriculum is central to such interests, and the establishment of relationships between the public and private spheres that promote unique perspectives in this specific field are customary, materializing in different formats and from different subjects. It is not for nothing that the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC) that deals with Secondary Education (Brazil, ²⁰¹⁸) is one of the contributions that it has in its genesis, in its elaboration and, at present, in its implementation, the performance of foundations, institutes and organizations that call themselves non-profit and based on civil society, that cross the private sector as philanthropic. This document was placed on the public discussion agenda from the Movement for the Base, a mobilization led by groups articulated to the third sector and the business sector that aimed at the adoption of unified guidelines for curricula across the country. Through its institutionalized and collective action - which includes the Lemann Foundation, Todos pela Educação, Instituto Ayrton Senna, Instituto Unibanco, and Instituto Natura among its promoters - this Movement was articulated to public entities and entities representing the statal and municipal education departments (Consed - Conselho Nacional de Secretários de Educação e Undime - União dos Dirigentes Municipais de Educação) and readjusted the country's curricular policy, with impacts on the didactic-pedagogical processes that reached schools of the most varied realities.

As much as this group occupies a prominent position in the direction of educational policy and, specifically, of the curriculum, other actors with similar origins have also associated their actions with the search for the implementation of the BNCC and promoted particular initiatives in order to favor the adoption of certain conceptions present in the document by the basic education schools. One of the prioritized fields concerns Projeto de Vida, conceived by Base (Brasil, ²⁰¹⁸) as an axis that guides the pedagogical practices for promoting reflection and planning of the student regarding their individual trajectory in society. The insertion of this didactic field would promote the integral formation established by the BNCC (Brasil, ²⁰¹⁸), corroborating with the ten general competencies defined by it (especially with number six, which explicitly mentions this element). The emphasis given to this curricular articulation axis by entities external to the schools and also by the education departments, however, raises concerns about the meanings expressed by Projeto de Vida and the implications of its implementation in the basic education curricula.

Therefore, clarifying these issues stands out as the objective of this article, considering the lack of studies that deal with promoting the thematic Project of Life in educational institutions and the relevance given to it in the current curricular discussions. To this end, a document developed by the Brazilian Micro and Small Business Support Service (SEBRAE) will be examined through content analysis (Bardin, ²⁰¹⁶) to facilitate pedagogical work in this thematic field. Also, guidelines organized by the Secretariat State of Education of Rio Grande do Sul in order to direct the implementation, in the network of its competence, of a curricular component that bears that name. The identified category will assist in confirming the hypothesis that this defining element of the curriculum favors the constitution of a formative process aimed at entrepreneurship, consolidating neoliberal assumptions in basic education that promote the individual responsibility of the subjects regarding the complex social problems resulting from the capital's performance.

The theoretical framework on which the study is based is composed by Dardot and Laval (²⁰¹⁶), in their propositions regarding the neoliberal rationality that guides social relations today; by Laval (²⁰¹⁹), who explains the processes that bring school dynamics closer to business functioning, clarifying its consequences; and by Montaño (²⁰¹⁰), discussing how the ideological tricks of capital disseminate concepts of distancing the State from elementary public services and delegate responsibility for social issues to philanthropy, the local community, and the individual. Other authors complement the discussion, which is organized in two sections that address, respectively, the prescriptions of the private entity referred to above for the pedagogical work in basic education with Project of Life and the guidelines of the State Secretariat of Education of Rio Grande do Sul for the insertion of a discipline focused on this thematic field. Establishing links between the proposed sections is the analytical category that systematizes both documents, and with the argument developed, the implications of the insertion of this formative axis in basic education are clarified.

Projeto de Vida as a formative thematic field in the public school curriculum

Documents, more than devices in which facts are described, information recorded, prescriptions or shared perspectives on a theme, "express life, conflicts, litigation, interests, political projects - history" (Evangelista, ²⁰¹², p. 56). The use of records that guide, clarify or lead the implementation of educational policy and, in relation to it, the curriculum as a source of research implies its understanding as elements of dissemination of intentions, interests, and meanings. Although they use a language related to the school day - accessible and colloquial - to advocate for their neutrality and complacency, they need to be analyzed rigorously and scientifically so that their senses are clarified. A specific document released by the Brazilian Micro and Small Business Support Service (SEBRAE) to facilitate the implementation of Projetode Vida in basic education is analyzed in this section, seeking to clarify its proposal and improve its understanding of the intentions and interests that constitute it.

Entitled "Empreendedorismo no Currículo Escolar do Ensino Médio" (Entrepreneurship in the High School Curriculum) and launched in 2020 by SEBRAE, the examined record is available on the entity's website, and its access is encouraged in initiatives of CER - SEBRAE Reference Center for Entrepreneurial Education (SEBRAE, ²⁰²⁰). It celebrates the publication of the BNCC and its emphasis on entrepreneurship, with the inclusion of the theme in the curricula being related to the qualification for work and the exercise of citizenship provided for in article 205 of the ¹⁹⁸⁸ Federal Constitution. Due to this bias, as an organization, vision of the future, responsibility for risks, and resilience, they favor not only employability but also the social inclusion of students.

This document has a section dedicated to Projeto de Vida, which justifies its selection to compose this analysis. This thematic field of training is mentioned as an element that assists in realizing the students' interests and desires, in their self-knowledge, and their preparation for life. However, in order for this to happen, it is recommended that the reflection on oneself, contact with overcoming stories that inspire students, collective problem solving, and contact with diversity be contemplated in the pedagogical work involved in this axis. Projeto de Vidais based on the principle of entrepreneurship and assumes that students turn their goals into reality.

Explicitly, therefore, there is an indication of the analytical category that systematizes their proposal regarding Projeto de Vida, which is confirmed by the organization of the analysis, the coding, and its categorization. As Bardin (2016) indicates, through this process, followed by inference and interpretation, it is possible to articulate "the surface of the texts" and "the factors that determined these characteristics" (Bardin, ²⁰¹⁶, p. 47), relating semantic structures to others that represent sociological, psychological, historical and political issues. In such a way, the content analysis allows to build the desired reflections regarding this proposal of pedagogical work with Projetode Vida, understanding, in the beginning, the interlocution of this axis with the constitution of an entrepreneurial culture.

This term is used literally in the document, mentioning teachers as its potential disseminators. For SEBRAE (²⁰²⁰), historically, there was a misunderstanding from which entrepreneurship was related only to the opening of businesses. More than that, however, the document under analysis indicates that this axis favors conscious attitudes and choices since the child's early years, fostering actions that continue to guide conduct during youth and promote personal fulfillment in the future. In the contribution, all are mentioned as individuals who can become entrepreneurs, developing capacities of "cooperation, co-creation [sic], innovation, planning and living in environments marked by uncertainties, rapid and abrupt changes, where the exercise of resilience can be a decisive factor for maintaining employability" (SEBRAE, ²⁰²⁰, p. 13).

The pedagogical work with Projeto de Vida is related to this perception regarding entrepreneurship, and the document under examination recommends the realization of a course that CER offers, the workshop "Projeto de Vida! Você tem um?" (Project of Life! Do you have one?), For teachers and managers. Directed at three main themes (Time management; My life project - The dream path towards goals; and My life project - Effectuation Matrix), this training intends to guide these professionals in the insertion of this particular element in their institutions and is offered in-person and remotely. In a language similar to SEBRAE's primary field of activity, which is business, the workshop emphasizes the Effectuation method, which is linked to a global movement for the insertion of entrepreneurship in schools. Conceiving this element as something that can be taught and that favors a successful trajectory in a flexible and unforeseen context, this perspective includes, as part of its learning, the understanding of failure as something pleasurable, guiding, among other issues, so that the subjects are advised to make investments restricted to what they can lose.

Another reference material of SEBRAE and which is indicated by the document under analysis to facilitate the understanding of education professionals regarding the insertion of Life Projects in their curricula, is the "Guia Essencial Para Novos Empreendedores" (Essential Guide for New Entrepreneurs) (SEBRAE, ²⁰¹⁵), a self-instructional course also offered by CER. Four volumes (Discovery, Ideation, Modeling, and Implantation) are made available in PDF format on a page of the entity, dealing with innovation, new technologies, and pop culture, in addition to providing motivational phrases for its readers. The document claims to provide the transformation of theoretical knowledge into immediate practices supported by the changes experienced in society, which would require "hands-on" activities and starting from the desire of young people to carry out large projects in a short time. This would be concerning the construction of a new business model that, guided by the document and serving as a basis for school education, would exempt the performance and assistance of other professionals, guiding the students' autonomy.

In this perspective, Projeto de Vida is understood as a tool that will guarantee the teaching of entrepreneurship - and the dissemination of its principles - in basic education schools. By stimulating the students' desire to achieve (to "make it happen"), this axis of training moves them, through socio-emotional competencies, to take responsibility for their future and to assume protagonists in solving the community's problems and those of their own. Motivated to innovate and create new and quick responses to the difficulties of reality, students develop attitudes desired by the market: deal with sudden changes and adapt to them; plan and make risky investments; be resilient and learn from mistakes, using them as strategies for future success; understand failure as natural and as a result of their own performance; and always be motivated, knowing and striving to overcome their limitations.

The excitement with which this group portrays the insertion of Projetode Vida from the BNCC, as well as the link between this axis and entrepreneurship, denotes the relevance that attributes to the pedagogical work the interests of the subjects to which they are linked in the market. The commemoration of the institutionalization, in basic education schools, of a training linked to behaviors that it considers relevant not only in its future collaborators but in society, also indicates this relationship and justifies its effort in providing teachers with courses and materials that make them direct their time with students to specific topics, identified by the entity as necessary. In doing so, SEBRAE also illustrates a movement instigated by neoliberalism that removes from the State the exclusivity regarding deliberation regarding educational policies and makes the private sector and philanthropy its partners (Montaño, ²⁰¹⁰).

This is because the standard response required to social problems is reconfigured in the current period of capitalism, being guided by the "State’s lack of accountability, […] capital exoneration and […] self-responsibility of the citizen and the local community” (Montaño, ²⁰¹⁰, p. 185). Thus, a new social contract is instituted, in which “social solidarity and universality and the right of services” are replaced by “local solidarity, self-help and mutual help” (Montaño, ²⁰¹⁰, p. 184). In addition to SEBRAE’s own performance, which clarifies the redirection of government action in relation to social policies, the concepts mentioned by Montaño (²⁰¹⁰) are present in the way the document “Entrepreneurship in the High School Curriculum” expresses teaching entrepreneurship at school, guiding personal engagement and local commitment as responsible for solving social problems. However, the explanation of such perceptions by SEBRAE (²⁰²⁰) does not constitute itself as isolated, but it can be identified in different projects and geographic spaces and shows itself articulated to the rationality that governs this historical time.

Neoliberalism, the current period of capitalism, is a rationality that structures and organizes “not only the action of the governors but even the conduct of the governed” (Dardot & Laval, ²⁰¹⁶, p. 15), which is constituted from “competition as a norm of conduct and the company as a model of subjectification” (Dardot & Laval, ²⁰¹⁶, p. 15). The exaltation of an entrepreneurial culture and its introjection in the ways of life and, in relation to this, also in the pedagogical processes, thus, is ratified by an “accounting and financial subjectification” (Dardot & Laval, ²⁰¹⁶, p. 28), or in other words, “The company is promoted to a model of subjectification: each individual is a company that must be managed and a capital that must make itself bear fruit” (Dardot & Laval, ²⁰¹⁶, p. 372) and it is these prescriptions that are similar to the document described above.

As the curriculum is not dissociated from the “broad context that defines it in time and space, nor from the school organization that makes it concrete” (Pacheco, ²⁰⁰³, p. 14), it appropriates the market conceptions that constitute society. It is imprisoned in the systemic model, converging with teaching by skills, imposed by the BNCC, due to the promise of employability, even though it is unable to guarantee the insertion of young people in the production chain (Lemos & Macedo, ²⁰²⁰). Instead of a human formation articulated to the common well-being principles, it results in the development of market skills, which deprive the public school of a space of democracy, equality, and collectivity. Historically constructed knowledge, reflexivity about historical, political, and social processes, and the development of attitudes and values ​​linked to the constitution of justice and social equity are meaningless and replaced by “hands-on” tasks. Linked to the pleasure of young people in getting involved in experimentation dynamics, practical activities with an emphasis on immediate effects are understood as sufficient to provide the composition of the school curriculum, which starts to be supported, from the insertion of Projeto de Vida, more in the development of conducts than in the constitution of knowledge.

Less theoretical training and more focused on the adoption of replicable methodologies, thus, is also understood as necessary for teachers. The contributions disclosed by SEBRAE (²⁰¹⁵; ²⁰²⁰) to help teachers are based on this premise, conceiving their preparation for the development of the axis in question as something fast, practical, and individual. Collective reflections are not prioritized, as well as in-depth studies on the historical, sociological, psychological, and pedagogical aspects involved in the teaching-learning process. Brief readings guided by emotional stimuli, in a language of simple appropriation and articulated in premises easily accepted by common sense, are sufficient to bring teachers closer to the expectations of the mercantile universe, represented by SEBRAE, which should only be reproduced by the teacher so that their goal is achieved.

However, they are not isolated movements that maintain the stability of neoliberal rationality, and, at the same time, different initiatives by different subjects reinforce this bias in society. In the same way, entrepreneurship in education carried out through the promotion of the thematic Projetode Vida is reaffirmed by various proposals, which indicates the relevance attributed to it in the basic education curriculum. The private sector does not polarize its defense, with the public authorities assuming and collaborating with the implementation of entrepreneurial prescriptions in schools that are part of their networks. After all, in capitalism, the State is appropriated by mercantile logic, constituting itself as an “instrument of class domination” (Harvey, ²⁰⁰⁵, p. 80) and having its role directed at providing goods and services to the capital, as discussed in the next section.

Projeto de Vida as a propulsion component of entrepreneurship in basic education

In the academic year of 2020, the state education network of Rio Grande do Sul promoted a curricular reorganization from which Projetode Vida was inserted as a curricular component in the final years of teaching elementary school and high school. Even though it was mentioned by BNCC (Brasil, ²⁰¹⁸) as mandatory only in the last stage of basic education, the formalization of this thematic axis through a subject offered since the beginning of adolescence denotes the interest on the part of this sphere of decision that the prescriptions of this formative field are carried out in the schools of its scope. The document organized by the State Secretariat of Education (Rio Grande do Sul, ²⁰²⁰), which contains the presentation of the component, the profile of the professional who should teach it, and the axes, objects of knowledge, and skills planned for each year, will be the research source for this section, with content analysis (Bardin, ²⁰¹⁶) remaining as the method used to understand the meanings and implications of this particular initiative.

Before starting to examine the document, however, it should be noted that, to a certain extent, the network’s position of transforming Projetode Vida into a school subject can be understood, a priori, as a contradiction, since, according to the Base (Brazil, ²⁰¹⁸), its implementation aims to promote the transversality of the curriculum. As much as its guidelines state the contrary, reducing this axis to a component does not reconstitute the intended link between knowledge. However, this organization ensures that the professionals designated to work with Projetode Vida are articulated to the proposal and promote their prescriptions in each of the schooling stages to which they are assigned. As the BNCC (Brasil, ²⁰¹⁸) proposes, even though the guidelines regarding pedagogical work are constant among the highlighted competencies and skills, the imposition of an approach related to themes related to Projeto de Vida becomes less explicit.

When proceeding to explore the document, autonomy and protagonism are initially indicated as elements to be prioritized by Projetode Vida Rio Grande do Sul’s State network. Through them, students would be led to develop their potential and achieve their goals and future ambitions. In addition, the search for school knowledge to find meaning in society through practices and experiences related to the students’ daily lives and that help to understand their immediate reality is also structural to the discipline. Creative problem solving, proactivity, self-confidence, communication, collaboration, and critical thinking are also priorities, as academic knowledge is stressed as important as socio-emotional skills and competencies. Entrepreneurship also appears explicitly, but, like the contribution analyzed in the previous section, it can be understood as the element that systematizes this curricular proposal.

This is because, after applying the same steps of content analysis (Bardin, ²⁰¹⁶) as in the previous section, the Movement that intends through Projetode Vida, to stimulate students’ ability to undertake. During the investigation, this characteristic permeates the axes, objects of knowledge and skills, reinforcing that, regardless of crises, when knowing their personal characteristics and reality and sharing a purpose with their peers (Garcia, ²⁰¹⁵), fighting with determination, any goals could be achieved. There is the identification of a continuous intention to engage the student, with the promotion of their individual responsibility for their life and their community, as well as the permanent presence of incentives for students to feel able to overcome individual and contextual limitations for themselves. The independence of the student and the normalization of the perspective that social problems exist and that their resolution depends on entrepreneurial initiatives accompany the elements highlighted by the curricular component, reinforcing the desire to perform as part of the curriculum and an intrinsic component to the individual’s lives.

More structured and more specific as to the axes to be addressed in each of the classes involved with such curricular component, the document examined is succinct and direct, with no contextualization and convincing effort perceived in the BNCC nor SEBRAE document (²⁰²⁰), for example. As an illustration, in the sixth-grade classes of elementary school, the pedagogical work should have its focus directed to the construction of the student’s identity and values ​​that need to support their attitudes, the stimulation of protagonism, and the management of resources for a sustainable life. Harmonic coexistence, knowledge about their characteristics and the reality around them, consumption that does not value waste, and solidarity in their community are indicated as elementary for this stage of schooling.

The work also appears as a field of discussion not only for the sixth grade, but for all other grades. Throughout elementary school, the approach to deconstruct prejudices about different types of work, the different types of remuneration, the specificities of the labor market in the region where the student resides, the realization of financial planning, and the knowledge of CLT (Consolidation of Labor Laws), issues that, in high school, expand. From the first grade, studying the characteristics of the professions, understanding the processes for their choice (feeling, sense of reality, and sense of opportunity, among other aspects), researching the transformations experienced in the world of work, develop skills that enable the mastery of technology by the student and to know sources of resources to make entrepreneurship feasible are some of the skills mentioned.

Allied to them, there are constant references to socio-emotional skills that imply instigating the student’s proactivity and persistence, leading them to reflect on their mindset, being flexible and empathetic, controlling their impulsiveness, and valuing affective matters over financial aspects. Being critical is also among the intentions of the curricular component under analysis, but this field is specifically addressed in terms of technology, the student’s personal habits, their prejudices, and the environment. Collaboration with their community and mutual help among their peers are linked to personal fulfillment, and there is also a prescription that the subjects’ interaction in the search for solutions, the understanding about their freedom, and the importance of the dedication of each individual in their projects they are also spelled out as related to the discipline.

Among the guidelines for directing work with Projeto de Vida in the different years of schooling is also the concept of entrepreneurship, examples of people who have been successful through entrepreneurial attitudes, the identification of elements that favor entrepreneurship in everyday situations, and even their own student practice in class in this field. As in the SEBRAE proposal (²⁰²⁰), entrepreneurship is mentioned as something to be learned (and training, verb used literally in the document), with the school constituting itself as the space responsible for such training. In fact, this perspective consolidates the competence bias that governs the BNCC (Brazil, ²⁰¹⁸) and stands out as one of the axes prioritized by organizations such as the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) in peripheral countries, such as Brazil, solidifying the school’s mission in the curriculum to provide “skills that can be transported to variable professional contexts” (Laval, ²⁰¹⁹, p. 81).

The school, from the materialization of these principles, appropriates the “spirit of enterprise” (Laval, ²⁰¹⁹, p. 81), being concerned not only with academic knowledge, as the document in question explicitly, but also with a specific capacity to act and with certain attitudes, adapting the subjects “to the professional behaviors that will be required of them later” (Laval, ²⁰¹⁹, p. 81). Stained under the urgency of modernization, the educational institution has its dynamics operationalized to approach the labor market demands even in the early years of its students’ adolescence. It is as if there was no time to be lost, since the constant reminder - on television, in the newspapers, and on the internet - of pressing unemployment warns about the obligation to instill in students, earlier and earlier, “stocks of operative knowledge usable for solve problems, deal with information or implement projects” (Laval, ²⁰¹⁹, p. 81), as their likely future employers would require.

Projeto de Vida component is a means of structuring entrepreneurship as part of the basic school curriculum, transforming business prescriptions, understood by neoliberalism as necessary in an educational process that favors their interests, which are schoolable. However, despite the explicit mention of learning about this thematic field as a way for students to progress, autonomously creating their occupation and a successful position in the job market, this dimension is less emphatic than the one that encourages the assimilation of the position, by students, of self-entrepreneurship (Dardot & Laval, ²⁰¹⁶). Less as possible self-employed professionals in the business world and more as suitable employees for the job market, the curricular component is dedicated to conforming to a profile of employees admissible by companies (and willing to adapt to their requirements).

Not to be ashamed of occupying low prestige positions, plan expenses in order to live sustainably based on the current remuneration, get to know CLT to understand their position as an employee, and maintain pleasant behaviors to the group, without questioning adverse opinions and following their obligations. These behaviors are worked in order to reinforce that the subject, in order to achieve their dreams and put their expectations into practice, needs to be motivated to face any obstacle, remaining emotionally stable and enduring the difficulties imposed by the context. Taking responsibility individually for adversities, they are encouraged to understand inequality as something natural in society, possible to overcome through their effort and selflessness.

The work is not discussed as a historical process or as a right of the subjects in their humanization process, but it starts to have its flexibility, and its informalization naturalized from the school curriculum. By promoting entrepreneurship, the school begins to normalize alienation, with reflections on student occupations being aimed at promoting the individual initiative as a way to circumvent the uncertainties and instability of capital. With daily life ratifying this expression in the most diverse channels, such as on social networks or television, the reinforcement of the subject as an entrepreneur of his own life seems to update education and make an effort to bring young people closer to reality, even if it only confirms it the school as another social space subservient to capital.

As a curricular component, Projeto de Vida also shows that the social harmony of the context in which the student lives is understood as their task, with the collectivity undertaken in their community constituting themselves as capable of overcoming structural and historical problems. (of which the contradictions resulting from the capital’s action are the main responsible). By assuming a leading role, the student would come to understand their position in overcoming his personal limitations, but this would also keep him from questioning absences from the public authorities or demanding his performance in local issues - along the lines of the State's withdrawal from social investments. expected by neoliberalism. The insistence, perceived in the document, in the approach of conciliatory conduct demonstrates an articulation of the discipline with such a bias, placing in the school the responsibility that its current student performs in becoming an entrepreneur of himself, assimilating the entrepreneurial prescriptions not only in his job, but as a conduct that moves all its behaviors, actions and relationships.

As much as the entire social context is immersed by the market precepts that govern sociability, with the insertion of entrepreneurship in an organized and structured way in schools through proposals such as the one mentioned, the processes of privatization of the content of education are intensified (Peroni, ²⁰¹⁵). There is the ratification that individual interests must guide the conduct and that the subjects need to recognize themselves as the only ones responsible for their trajectory, ignoring social inequalities and naturalizing them. It corroborates, therefore, with the legitimation of neoliberal principles that advocate the dispute of individuals in the competitive market as defining the merit of each one. All are seen as having the same opportunities, with the effort justifying the achievement of the desired success. At the same time, the bias is reinforced that the State should not be blamed for individual incompetence, with social policies being diminished and directed towards philanthropy or the market itself.

Although the public authorities emphasize this initiative, and not by a private entity - such as the one investigated in the previous section - this effort to transform the school into a space similar to the dominant rationality cannot be understood as divergent concerning the performance of the agencies state-owned companies. The State does not constitute itself as an abstraction, but as an entity that performs, in a concrete way, tasks that benefit capital, either through crisis management or through the provision of public goods and physical and social infrastructures (Harvey, ²⁰⁰⁵). Even when administered by subjects and political groups linked to positions that militate for their expressive performance in social services (understood as damaging to the functioning of the public machine due to neoliberal biases), they are unable to break - without deconstructing the rationality that sustains society - with the prescriptions which lead to the implementation of arrangements, the practice of exemptions and the granting of public benefits. The policies that the State promotes, in such a way, are not only texts that convey an official discourse but represent alliances and express the interests of several theorists, even though these are not exposed in their official documents (Pacheco, ²⁰⁰³).

In this way, the fact that governments and education departments support proposals that value the disconnection of education from democratic principles and that are guided by equality and social justice reinforces the finding that values ​​and managerial principles guide sociability. The fact that they are constituted as spaces for public deliberation, by the way, does not guarantee that these spheres consolidate popular desires, which denotes the need for idealizations to be avoided in research. However, investigations are carried out to identify the materialization of their proposals in reality. Thus, reflections on the meanings expressed by them are constructed, and the implications of their prescriptions are perceived, as intended in this article. In this analysis, the documents proposed by both subjects in question are similar, and even though they have different origins, they share the same interest: to implement, through the basic education curriculum, entrepreneurship based on the promotion of Projeto de Vida, formative axis stipulated by the BNCC (Brazil, ²⁰¹⁸).

Final Thoughts

Entrepreneurship stands out as the category that systematizes the curricular component Projetode Vida, both in the initiative promoted by SEBRAE (²⁰²⁰) to favor the work with this thematic axis in basic education, and in the implementation of a curricular component with that same name in the network state education system in Rio Grande do Sul. The meanings expressed by the analyzed documents, both examined by means of content analysis (Bardin, ²⁰¹⁶), denote the linking of the proposals with the promotion, in the training of students, of conducts that stimulate them to develop their entrepreneurial potential. Seeing themselves as protagonists and understanding their performance in society as an autonomous process, through the development of socio-emotional skills and abilities and the appropriation of concepts related to the theme, students are immersed in business prescriptions that encourage them to understand themselves as entrepreneurs of themselves (Dardot & Laval, ²⁰¹⁶).

In both analyzed proposals, entrepreneurship stands out as the way to reduce social inequalities, as if an entrepreneurial education (constituted in a culture) could provide elements that would develop in students the ability to perform, to innovate, and, with that, to overcome the difficulties of their context. Therefore, developing their “Life Project” is linked to understanding themselves as responsible for their own lives, for their choices and opportunities, understanding the individual and local sphere as the provider of which benefits. The implications refer to the emptying of education from its human formative qualities, to the filling of the school curriculum with skills and abilities that can be used at work, to the achievement of employability as the only factor of personal fulfillment, and to the intensification of inequalities, making school knowledge an instrument of conformity with capitalism.