1 Introduction

Assuming the study activity as an object of analysis and starting from the objective of problematizing the challenges posed to the implementation of this activity in the context of public universities, especially in the context of undergraduate degrees, the present work is outlined, from a methodological point of view, as an theoretical essay (^{MENEGHETTI, 2011}) and anchors its discussions in the field of historical-cultural psychology, intending to carry out a critical analysis of the history of Higher Education and teacher training in Brazil in light of the object and theoretical-methodological perspective that guide the argument presented.

Criticism is, without a doubt, one of the most relevant contributions of the historical-cultural approach - anchored in historical-dialectical materialism - to the debate about education. From a critical analysis, we seek to explain the roots and connections that constitute a phenomenon from its multiple determinations, acting through the gaps in ideology, in its contradictions, giving movement to what is naturalized. Critical discourse is that which opposes the ideological, it is the anti-discourse of ideology, its negative, its contradiction (^{CHAUÍ, 2007}).

Taking these assumptions into account, the argument presented intends to support the thesis that the critical and revolutionary power of historical-cultural psychology, expressed through its theoretical-methodological framework, will contribute to confronting Brazilian educational problems as we move forward of a concrete analysis of the conditions, problems, contradictions and challenges posed to professionals, families, students, activists and researchers in the field of school education in our country.

In this sense, based on a discussion that in theory puts our object of analysis in its theoretical-methodological field of origin and its relevance for teacher training, we begin to debate the challenges posed to the implementation of the study activity in the context of Brazilian public Higher Education, especially in the scope of degrees, based on three keys of analysis that focus on some of the conditions related to the organization of Higher Education: i) the political-social and educational project historically assumed by the Brazilian public university and the project necessary for a training inspired by the principles of historical-cultural psychology; ii) the historical problems of teacher training in Brazil and the private hegemony in this field and iii) the limits that determine the concrete conditions for the study of undergraduate students in the context of student retention and mental health.

With this argumentative path, we wish to explain and expand, based on the deep contradictions of Brazilian Higher Education, gaps for interventions that are at the service of objectification educational processes aligned with the assumptions defended by historical-cultural psychology for education and, therefore, implicated with the promotion the complex, multiple and integral development of teachers in initial training and committed to the construction of another social and school reality.

2 Study activity and its role in teacher training

The theoretical-conceptual understanding regarding the promotion of study activity in school education, from the historical-cultural psychology perspective, presents, as one of its premises, the consideration of the ethical- political principles that support this theory.

Historical-cultural psychology has its origins determined by an intense and original work of research and conceptual formulation carried out in the context of Soviet society, post-revolution of 1917. In the USSR, the weaving of new political and production relations that surpassed the Class and gender inequalities were a fundamental point for the Bolsheviks (^{GOLDMAN, 2014}) in their building project of a socialist society even though, concretely, this process was carried out with many contradictions and limits (^{TUNES; PRESTES, 2018}).

Consequent to the challenges of that situation, the researchers who produced the theory in question assumed as a structuring element of their works the commitment to social transformation, to the constitution of socialist society and to the formation of a new human being, which is expressed by Vygotsky, a great precursor and exponent of this perspective, in his several works (^{VIGOTSKI, 1998}; 2004; 2006), as well as by his collaborators and followers.

This reflection interests us because it reinforces the understanding that the concrete forms adopted for the organization of education, especially school education, are determined, not without contradictions, by the mode of the society production in which educational relations take place (^{SAVIANI, 2007}; VYGOTSKI, 2010).

Thus, the fight for education in favor of the development, self-awareness and freedom of all human beings presents itself as one of the great contributions of this theoretical perspective from a context committed to the construction of a fair, supportive and free society.

It is necessary to anticipate that one cannot draw "pedagogical conclusions" from psychology, that is, it is not possible from psychological knowledge to say what the teacher should do to address pedagogical needs. However, as a result of the theoretical-methodological, ethical and political framework that supports historical-cultural psychology, its researchers were concerned with investigating and conceptually formulating - from an integral, dialectical and historical materialist and monistic view of human development (^{BEATÓN, CALEJÓN; BRAVO, 2022}) - which educational practices would be most appropriate to produce changes and transformations in the course of human beings development in a full and integral way.

It is in this context that the discussion about the study activity stands out as an essential element for the organization of school education. The study activity is the way through which the student appropriates scientific concepts - and the mental actions necessary to construct this knowledge - based on a very similar process to what society needed to carry out to produce these concepts (^{LONGAREZI; PUENTES, 2012}).

The impacts of the study activity experience on the development of school- age children are so many that it makes it, from this theoretical-methodological conception, the activity that guides the students’ development in this period of their lives (^{LEONTIEV, 1988}).

However, the study activity continues to get a central space in the school and academic processes that take place in later periods of a student's life, even in Higher Education, in which the study activity begins to guide scientific- professional preparation. In the words of Davidov and Markova:

The initial school age is characterized by the introduction of students to the study activity, their mastery of its components; Here this activity has rhetorical importance. In middle school age, the child's mastery of the general structure of the study activity gains space, the formation of his voluntary character, the awareness of the individual particularities of work related to study, the use of this activity as a means to organize social interactions with other students. Advanced school age is characterized by the use of study activity as a means of professional guidance and preparation, the mastery of the means of autonomous study activity and self-education and also the passage of assimilation of the socially elaborated experience of study activity, present in books, to their enrichment through creative investigative activity (^{DAVIDOV; MARKOVA, 1987}, p. 330).

Furthermore, it is through the experience of the study activity that the social needs linked to the production of knowledge can be internalized and transformed into personal needs by each student. Therefore, the study activity needs to be organized in such a way that the necessary reasons are mobilized for students to engage in this process, also considering the experience in the local context of life (^{FREITAS; LIBÂNEO, 2022}) and the main activity corresponding to the period of human development in which these subjects find themselves (^{ELKONIN, 1987}).

For ^{Davidov (1981}), the purposes of carrying out study activities need to be linked to the development of consciousness and theoretical thinking - psychic capacity involved in understanding the internal relations and connections constituting a given phenomenon and the general and particular dimensions of an object and human object-practical activity (^{DAVIDOV, 1988}) - and, therefore, the development of students' personality (DAVIDOV; SLOBÓDCHIKOV, 1991).

In this way, the main difference between study activity and other activities developed in the context of school education is that its purpose and the desired result is the student’s transformation himself, his constitution of new psychological formations and not just the transformation of things about which the subject acts on or which act on him or, neither, the accumulation of abstract information about reality, disconnected from the concrete conditions from which they were produced.

In summary, the result of the study activity, in the course of which the assimilation of scientific concepts occurs, first of all, is the subject’s transformation himself, the promotion of his psychic development which, fundamentally, is not restricted to the development of his intellectual capabilities, therefore, it is based on the conception that the psyche is an interfunctional system and, thus, the affective, volitional, motivational, perceptive, attentional, mnemonic dimensions are also constituted and transformed within human activities, impacting the formation of creative capabilities of the subjects and, consequently, in their personality.

However, for these possibilities to become effective, the study activity must require students to analyze the conditions of origin and development of knowledge and to master the procedures necessary to obtain this knowledge, to be able to represent the essential relations that make up knowledge in study and be able to control and evaluate their own study actions (^{DAVIDOV; SLOBÓDCHIKOV, 1991}).

The procedures description necessary to organize the study activity highlights the complexity of this process and the importance of the teacher being trained and intentionally willing to teach not only the school contents, but also the means necessary for students to actively appropriate them, creatively and critically, based on collective and individual strategies (^{LEÓN, 2017}). In other words, we start from the assumption that one of the responsibilities of the teaching activity is the creation of the necessary conditions for the organization of the study activity by the student.

We understand that this debate has a double contribution to university education, in particular to the field of teacher training: it is necessary to train teachers who are capable of organizing teaching situations that encourage the objectification of the study activity, but before that, it is necessary to train them as students, because by experiencing the power of the study activity in their learning experience and in the course of their own development, future teachers will be able, theoretically and experientially, to understand the centrality of the teaching activity in the objectification of the study activity and, consequently, in human formation from an integral and emancipatory perspective.

Thus, when we refer to the context of teacher training, it is necessary to problematize what the training processes that undergraduates were subjected to during their experience as students, whether in Basic Education or in Higher Education, because how can we assume that teachers will be able to organize the study activity, from the perspective defended here, without having experienced, as students, training spaces coherent with these premises or without the possibility of appropriating the knowledge and processes related to this phenomenon?

In this sense, the discussion about the organization of study activity, in the context of degrees, stands out as a powerful tool for understanding the immense humanizing possibilities that occur in the exercise of teaching activity, it is committed to promoting study activity and, consequently, with the learning and development of students.

Furthermore, the very theoretical-methodological conception that guides the understanding of what it is to teach, how to teach, what to teach for and how to learn scientific knowledge presents itself as an important device for facing a historical challenge in training and teaching practice: overcoming the divide between theory and practice, between science and life, between learning and developing.

According to ^{Gatti (1987}), the technical approach to pedagogical practice is one of the problems that historically persists in teacher training. In this sense, the questioning of the training processes to which future education professionals are subjected remains on the agenda.

However, it is not enough for us to debate the challenges posed to teacher training itself. It is necessary that we discuss the general pedagogical conditions and social determinations that permeate this process, since, in the current situation, there is no space for idealistic and romanticized perspectives about the role of education in human formation, except in perspectives that aim to align with strengthening of the status quo (^{CARVALHO; MARTINS, 2016}).

Given this, in the next section, we will problematize the historical dilemmas and contradictions that lead the hegemonic project of the Brazilian public university, to then deepen the debate on issues related to teacher training.

3 The disputes over the Brazilian public university project

The debate about the challenges posed to the implementation of study activities in Brazilian higher education requires examining the political-social and pedagogical projects that shape the practices and relations aimed at within universities, as well as the objectives set for carrying out study activities in Higher Education teaching - as consequences of the purposes socially placed at this education level.

In general, it is necessary to identify at least two of the projects that compete for the role and space of public universities in Brazilian society. Above all, the hegemonic forces are in favor of educational pragmatism and the privatization of higher education, both with regard to the provision of places for students and with regard to the logic and ethics of shaping university relations, creating precarious work and study conditions and restricting academic objectives to the demands of the market and capital through a narrow-minded local elite subordinate to the international elite. In opposition, minority forces, but essential for a university project in favor of the needs of the majority of Brazilian society, defend this institution as a space for criticism of the current mode of social organization, of production of knowledge, science and technology in order to favor the facing social problems from a collective ethic, understanding that the university can be an instrument in the process of building national sovereignty.

In view of this, debating Brazilian Higher Education, unveiling the determinations that constitute it, presupposes assuming as a starting point the existence of complex relations between school education and the historical development of Brazilian society, as ^{Chauí (2001}) analyzes, the university, as a social institution, expresses and realizes in a determined way the society of which it is and is a part.

In the case of Brazilian school education, it is appropriate to consider the educational crisis as a project, a program (^{RIBEIRO, 1986}) closely linked to our position of political-economic and, consequently, cultural dependence in the complex global geopolitical dynamics (^{FERNANDES, 2020}).

From the perspective of the Marxist theory of dependence, the role of foreign capital in controlling Latin American economies, the lack of commitment of the national bourgeoisies to a nation project and the conservatism of the landowning elites are important elements in maintaining dependent and peripheral capitalism in the global South. (^{BAMBIRRA, 2012}) and are strongly present in the hegemonic public university project in Brazil.

Dependence as a necessary route for expropriation, exploitation and destruction of Brazilian territory has been present in our history since the Portuguese invasion and the establishment of slavery practices and native and African peoples’ genocide, the cradle of the construction of colonialist and imperialist social relations that, inevitably, they produced important milestones in the school education field, belatedly, developed in the country.

Referring directly to the level of education that is the focus of our debate, it is important to highlight that no university was founded in colonial Brazil since, in an agrarian, slave-owning society with few possibilities for free labor, there was no place for “instruction and culture” (^{CASTELO BRANCO, 2004}, p. 65). Added to this, the first Brazilians (descendants of the colonizers) to access university education did so in European lands, in institutions that attributed a technical-scientific character to their curricula with a view to meeting demands related to the Industrial Revolution (^{SAVIANI, 2009}a).

It was only after the Portuguese royal family’s flight to Brazil, in 1808, that the project of building higher schools began, inspired by Portuguese institutions and with an essentially pragmatic, utilitarian and professional character (RONDON, 20 06).

The process of building Brazilian Higher Education only reached consolidation with the creation of the university regime, in 1931, following the Francisco Campos reform (^{SAVIANI, 2009}a). Even though, as Brito and Sampaio (s/d) discuss, the construction of an original university model - which would go beyond the reproduction of European or North American models or the simple joining of isolated faculties and schools - and committed to the national reality never took effect.

For ^{Fernandes (2020}), they are the conservative and counter-revolutionary forces that, from within the university or through the State, hold power over the direction of this institution and do so in order to defend liberal and neoliberal interests within universities, a fact that has been deepening since the “university reform” (Law No. 5,540, of November 28, 1968 (BRASIL, 1968)) which led to the intensification of the elitist and conservative character of public universities, moving universities away from national-developmental references (^{LEHER, 2019}) . In the words of Florestan Fernandes:

The university reform was a victim of this tangle of contradictions, which highlights how Brazilian society is poor in political dynamisms socially based on conflicting collective interests, but strong enough to overcome the particularisms and individualisms inherited from the colonial period (2020, p. 54).

However, the defeats achieved through the university reform of 1968 became the driving force behind dense and broad debates about the university in the 1970s and 1980s. On the agenda were topics such as the role of this institution in the face of social needs and the project of nation; criticism and opposition to university reforms, highlighting social and political issues, the meaning of knowledge in a peripheral society that lived under a dictatorship and fought for democracy (^{CHAUÍ, 2001}).

In this sense, even though the dependent, private and mercantilist logic has prevailed as the ethos of Brazilian Higher Education, there are contradictions that need to be identified so that the historical examination of this institution can serve the purpose of explaining the university projects that were and are in dispute which, in short, refer to the contribution possibilities of these institutions to the construction of national sovereignty or the maintenance of a functioning subject to the interests of the national and international bourgeoisie.

Thus, in Brazilian public universities it is possible to identify ideals and projects for the construction of an institution structured based on the public, the common and the production of knowledge at the service of the people’s well-being, even though, in its development process, a profile prevailed pragmatic and utilitarian in formation, far from national problems that determine social inequality such as agrarian reform, urban reform, public education reform (^{LEHER, 2019}).

For Florestan ^{Fernandes (2020}), replacing the historical role of the university in favor of the majority of Brazilians’ needs presupposes that this institution assumes as a necessity the denial and overcoming of cultural dependence and educational underdevelopment and, consequently, constitutes itself as an instrument in the facing our position of dependence in the world system. According to the author, this process demands the formation of a university dynamic based on autonomy (as a sociocultural and political force that has historically risen against the monopoly of knowledge by “large traditional families”) and on the intellectual radicalism necessary to confront the status quo.

It is important to emphasize that the submission of universities to the mechanisms and demands of the bourgeoisie and the market is not a reality only of Brazilian institutions, but, on the contrary, expresses a global trend that has structured an agenda for education (^{DIAS SOBRINHO, 2005}) based on economic logic of competitiveness and profit.

Internationally, important milestones for the process of commercialization of Higher Education can be found in the Washington Consensus - a symbol of the establishment of neoliberalism as a new social, economic and political order in the world and the imposition of the privatization of public services in the context of Latin America (^{SAVIANI, 2018}); in the inclusion, by the World Trade Organization (WTO), of this level of education in the list of services that can be regulated by the General Agreement on Trade in Services (AGCS), in 1994, in view of its enormous importance for the market and, finally, in the “Bologna Process” (Europe).

As it is a political-economic project pioneered for higher education, an analytical and critical look at the structuring concepts of the Bologna Process and its effects on signatory universities is necessary for our argument.

From the perspective of ^{Bianchetti and Magalhães (2015}), adherence to this process meant: a reduction in training and consequent work overload for teachers and students; progressive reduction of public resources and privatization of education; resignification of the concept of university autonomy with the extinction of collegial political, administrative and pedagogical decisions discussed within universities.

Still regarding the pedagogical effects resulting from this Process, ^{León (2011}) analyzes that productivity became productive, as the standards to be achieved disrespected the pedagogical dynamics of the institutions, creating a “Fordism” industrial rhythm. Furthermore, the intense presence of external control and evaluation agencies affected the creative dynamics of education, robbing teachers and students of their time organization. In other words, a university dynamic is consolidated that is contrary to the demands previously presented for the organization of teaching committed to promoting study activity, learning and the integral and multiple development of students.

In summary, the Bologna Process confirmed a neoliberal language of economic competitiveness in higher education policies in Europe, creating a model to be exported to the rest of the world, with strong repercussions in Brazil (^{ROBERTSON, 2009}).

In the Brazilian context, the maximum expression of the understanding of Higher Education as a commodity is presented through the intense presence of international conglomerates that maintain Higher Education institutions and trade shares on the Stock Exchange (^{SAVIANI, 2009}a).

The invasion of international conglomerates, as educational agents in Brazil, is closely linked to the process of expansion of Higher Education in the country. In this process, public resources were the engine that generated the protagonism of these agents in this scenario, making Brazil the country with the most commercialized education in the world (^{LEHER, 2019}).

For ^{Chauí (2001}), the acceptance of private financing produces the following effects in public universities: I. loss of university autonomy or freedom to define priorities, content, forms, deadlines and use of research, which become entirely heteronomous; II. acceptance that the State is responsible for research in public institutions; III. consent to the fact that private financing becomes a salary supplement and a source of infrastructure supply for research work, privatizing the public university; IV. growing discredit of the humanities, since their production cannot be immediately inserted into productive forms, such as the results of the sciences; V. collusion with the third-world condition for scientific research, since the true funding for long-term and non-refundable research is made in the first world.

^{Chauí (2003}) also presents the effects of the logic of the financial market on universities as: I. reduction in undergraduate and postgraduate time; II. At the teaching level, the understanding of space/time necessary for this logic causes disciplines to increasingly abandon the transmission of their own histories, knowledge of their classics, the issues that gave birth to them and the historical transformations of these questions; in summary: III. the absorption of the space/time of financial capital and the market leads to the abandonment of the fundamental core of university work, that is, the academic-professional training of students.

In view of this, the commodification and entrepreneurship of higher education puts at risk the possibilities for universities to effectively contribute to tackling collective problems of public interest and foster teaching and study conditions committed to student learning and development.

In the most recent situation, explicit attacks on Higher Education, science and technology, in their collective and public dimensions, have gained new contours under the effects of irrationalism, obscurantism and denialism as expressions of old authoritarian and conservative social and cultural mechanisms, a process that it even led to offensives in the education field financing and questioning the social function of scientific knowledge.

For ^{Leher (2019}), the profound historical setbacks that mark our current situation - since the illegitimate dismissal of President Dilma Rousseff and the election of Jair Bolsonaro - show that, in the political and economic bloc that is in power, “there are no dominant local bourgeois fractions capable of embracing, in their class project, the university committed to national and people’s problems” (p. 29).

An exemplary case of this argument can be found in the “Future-se” program, which proposes the transformation of universities into service organizations responsible for their financing, to be managed by Social Organizations that would work from investment funds traded on the Stock Exchange. For ^{Leher (2019}), this program seeks to free the Federal Government from financing these institutions and erode constitutional precepts, especially that of university autonomy.

From a prospective point of view, the current panorama of public universities signals a very worrying future according to ^{Leher's (2019}) analysis.

According to the author, the environment is hostile to science, culture and art. Democracy is under increasing threat, and part of this offensive is the purpose of giving new functions to the universities as utilitarian organizations, through the gradual withdrawal of public budgets and the imposition of a financing model that ensures the supremacy of particularistic interests over freedom of expression chair, the commitment to the problems of the people and to self-propelled and democratic nation projects.

For ^{Saviani (2009}a), universities are faced with two possible futures: bowing to the logic and impositions of the market (which has been prevailing and says of a predictable and viable destiny, given our concrete conditions of sociability) or reversing this trend, which would imply redirecting the economic project that currently organizes our society and assuming education as a strategic factor in the country's development (even though it is an unpredictable future and with problematic viability, it constitutes the necessary path for those committed to the humanizing ideals and quality of education).

Thus, in the field of challenges posed to the organization of study activity in Higher Education, from the perspective defended here, it is clear which university project can offer teaching conditions that promote university education committed to emancipatory processes (the subjects, of the knowledge, institutions, academic and social relations, Society) and critics. In this sense, there is an urgent need to organize an organized confrontation with mercantilist logic and ethics within universities, even though political-social determinations tend in the opposite direction.

For ^{Leher (2019}), even with contradictions and limits, public universities fulfilled the essential function of being critical spaces for societies: criticism of the economic policy of the business-military dictatorship, its educational model, its priorities in terms of science and technology. According to the author, there are no other institutions capable of anticipating what could turn out to be major problems for people and denouncing problems caused by particularistic interests with the legitimacy, systematic and breadth of universities.

However, the density of attacks launched in the current situation against universities shows that the reversal of the heteronomy framework that determines these institutions will not be possible in strictly university spaces. For ^{Leher (2019}), it is the protagonists of social struggles that can change this framework of heteronomy, given that it is essential that genuine dialogues be forged with struggles and social movements in order to achieve a conception of the university as a public institution committed to the living well for the people, an institution concerned with collective problems, an instrument in the fight against imperialism and in defense of the necessary reforms so that the university is able to fulfill these purposes.

Bringing this debate closer to the context of teacher training, it is therefore necessary to overcome the split among “who thinks and who does” education in Brazil, as this logic intensifies the impacts of a university education that is alien to the real needs of the subjects that inhabit school places.

Furthermore, the field of basic education has been disputed and occupied by private logic in an even more intense, systematized and effective way than universities, so that it makes no sense to resist the commodification of higher education as if this level of education did not have an intrinsic and interdependent relation with basic education, forming a totality.

Therefore, it is essential that universities, especially teacher training courses, break the hierarchy between Higher Education and Basic Education, advancing in the construction of exchange and reciprocity relations committed to tackling the problems that plague Brazilian education.

Without a doubt, in order to face this challenge, it is necessary to understand, among many other determinations, the challenges specific to the field of teacher training. It is this issue that we intend to focus on in the next section.

4 Historical challenges in the field of teacher training

The history of higher education courses for educators in Brazil is closely linked to the process of organizing the educational field that began in the 1920s (^{SAVIANI, 2004}), since, in this context, the problem of popular education and the defense of the workers’ professionalization schools constituted one of the flags of the struggle for the construction of a national educational policy (^{SCHEIBE, 1983}).

The teacher training process began with the creation of normal schools - which offered students training at secondary level (^{SAVIANI, 2004}) - and strengthened with Decree n.19.852/1931 (BRASIL, 1931) which provided for the introduction of the Faculty of Education, Sciences and Literature in the organization of Brazilian universities. The Institute of Education of the University of São Paulo, created in 1934, was the first experience of university teacher training (^{SCHEIBE, 2008}). However, according to ^{Scheibe (1983}) and ^{Fávero (1999}), it was only with Decree Law no. 1190 of 1939 (BRASIL, 1939), which created the National Faculty of Philosophy, which the field of higher teacher training achieves structuring.

The first arrangement proposed for teacher training explains the secondary nature that the pedagogical dimension would assume in this field. Students underwent initial training in the bachelor's degree that lasted three years and, subsequently, upon completing a “Didactics” course, to be carried out for a period of one year, they obtained the bachelor's degree (^{SCHEIBE, 1983}).

This initial layout left profound marks on the training of Brazilian teachers. This model, commonly referred to as “3+1”, is conceptualized by ^{Gatti (2013}-2014) as a “hybrid training scheme” (p. 39) in which degrees are placed as an addendum to bachelor’s degrees, proving to be almost impervious to construction of specific concepts for teacher training.

According to ^{Scheibe (1983}), until the 1960s, the role of Higher Education in the training of basic education teachers was insignificant, not reaching 30% of these professionals. According to the author, in this context, the dissociation between content/method and theory/practice was predominant.

As a measure to face this reality, from Law 4024 on Guidelines and Bases of National Education (LDB) of 1961 (BRASIL, 1961), the training scheme in undergraduate courses organized in three years for bachelor degrees and one year for didactics was formally abolished (^{SCHEIBE, 1983}). Alternatively, bachelor and licentiate degrees now have the same duration. However, for ^{Scheibe (1983}), training in the pedagogical field was not qualified with this strategy and degrees continued to be weakened.

In view of this, the creation of the Faculties of Education, through the university reform enacted in the context of the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship (Law 5540 of 1968), presented itself as yet another measure that aimed to bring about changes in teacher training courses. However, few impacts are produced (^{SCHEIBE, 1983}).

Another important milestone in the history of teacher training was established by the separation between professionals who could work in primary and secondary education, starting with the LDB of 1971 (Law 5692 of 1971 (BRASIL, 1971)). According to ^{Scheibe (1983}), this measure was understood as a way to achieve technical improvement, efficiency and teaching productivity, a clear expression of the technical conception in the context of Brazilian education.

Even in the LDB of 1996 (Law 9394 of 1996 (BRASIL, 1996)) - in which education is understood as a right and teacher professionalization a task to be developed, primarily, in Higher Education - teacher training based on a solid university education was not achieved, a historic claim in this field (^{SCHEIBE, 2008}).

In fact, as ^{Tanuri (2000}) discusses, teacher training at secondary level predominated in Brazil until the end of the 20th century. For ^{Freitas (2007}), the resumption and expansion of normal courses at secondary level at the end of the last century consolidates training at this level of education as a permanent, not transitory, public policy. Furthermore, the possible expansion of Higher Education was marked by the expansion model of universities (mainly private institutions) implemented in the 1990s based on State reforms imposed by international organizations based on a mass logic and at reduced costs that put it in the second place the knowledge of the epistemological field of education and its pedagogical mediation in teacher training (^{FREITAS, 2007}).

The first decades of the 21st century herald important, but still insufficient, progress in the field of Higher Education teacher training. From the 2021 School Senso (INEP, 2022), it is possible to observe that 80.3% of teachers who work in Early Childhood education have completed Higher Education (78.1% have an academic degree and 2.2% have a bachelor's degree), 12.3% have a normal high school/teaching degree and 7.3% of professionals still work with secondary education or lower. In the initial years of primary education, 86.4% of professionals have completed higher education (83.4% have an academic degree and 3.0% have a bachelor's degree) and 9.2% have a normal secondary education/teaching degree.

However, it is not enough to advance in the provision of Higher Education courses for education professionals. It is necessary to discuss the quality of training that teachers have received and to move forward in articulating a national policy for teacher training discussed in and with society and guaranteed by public authorities.

In this sense, a historical analysis shows that, since the creation of the first normal schools, the scope of teacher training has been dominated by the private sector, explaining as a keynote of Brazilian public educational policies a lack of responsibility of the State for effective education of the population.

In the current context, the contradictions constituting the field of degrees were intensified by the experiences of “Remote Emergency Teaching”, an educational format built in the context of the SARS-CoV-2 (New Coronavirus) pandemic, which reaffirmed the logic of expanding training courses initial training of light teachers and without quality criteria, with a sharp increase in the prevalence of distance learning courses. For ^{Leher (2019}, p. 173), “the most perverse side of the education commodification is certainly in the massive distance learning courses”.

According to the Sense of Higher Education (INEP, 2022), the year 2020 was marked by the surpassing of enrollments in face-to-face courses (1,050,035) by distance courses (2,008,979). Still according to data from this sense, between 2010 and 2020, enrollments in face-to-face teaching increased by 2.3% while in distance learning the increase was 233.9%. In terms of undergraduate degrees, in 2020, 40.7% of students were enrolled in face-to-face courses and 59.3% in distance learning courses. It is noteworthy that, as discussed by ^{Gatti and Barreto (2009}), the monitoring of courses offered remotely, which have their guidelines well defined by federal regulations, has not been carried out with the necessary effectiveness. According to Gatti (2013-2014), there are many signs that the expansion of the offer of distance learning degree courses is happening without developing a more comprehensive pedagogical teacher training project and without the basic operational structures functioning properly³.

Still regarding the quality of teacher training courses, it is necessary to analyze the academic approaches that characterize this field. According to ^{Saviani (2004}), two conceptions can be highlighted: a perspective that transcends the “limits of purely professional interest” aiming for a character of universality in teacher training in its scientific dimension and another that points to a more utilitarian and practical conception. According to the author, the space for technical and pragmatic professional training prevailed in Brazilian degrees, not configuring the space for teacher training as a field of investigation and theoretical-scientific foundation on Education.

Analyzes of the historical challenges posed to teacher training reveal a permanent split between specific and pedagogical training, with a small part of the curriculum dedicated to professional teaching practices, school issues, didactics and school learning (^{GATTI, 1992}; ^{ANDRÉ et al., 1999}; GATTI, 2013- 2014), in addition to a lack of coordination between teachers training undergraduate students (GATTI, 1992; ANDRÉ et al., 1999) and a lack of a continuum between initial training and in-service training (^{LIBÂNEO; PIMENTA, 1999}; ANDRÉ, 2010).

Added to this, we have the fact that, historically, teachers have been placed as a “scapegoat” in the educational system (^{GATTI, 1992}). In this context, an impossible dissociation occurs, as problems in the quality of training and teaching work are talked about without considering issues related to working conditions, such as salaries and working hours. In this regard, Saviani discusses:

In effect, precarious working conditions not only neutralize the actions of teachers, even if they were well trained. Such conditions also make good training difficult, as they act as a factor in discouraging the search for teacher training courses and dedication to studies (2009b, p. 153).

This issue is even reflected in themes related to research on teacher training. As ^{Marli (2009}) analyzes, objects such as the political dimension in teacher training; working conditions, career path and unionization remain unexplored in research carried out in the 1990s and 2000s.

Finally, it is necessary to highlight that most of the current measures implemented in the field of teacher training are based on guidelines issued by international organizations that collaborate in their financing and are based on the values, principles and needs of neoliberalism (^{FREITAS, 2002}). An example of this can be found in the Common National Curricular Base (BNCC) and in the guidelines for teacher training derived from it (BNC-training and BNC- continuing training). Direct products of the privatization process and intensification of neoliberal private logic in Brazilian schools.

As ^{Sena, Albino and Rodrigues (2021}) analyze, the BNCC was discussed, disputed and approved in a short time and in a context of important political, economic and social changes that have as expression the legal-media- parliamentary coup of 2016 (^{SAVIANI, 2018}) - which removed President Dilma Rousseff -, the arrest of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2017) and the election of Jair Bolsonaro (2018) as president of Brazil - representative of the ultra-right wing and supporter of neoliberal and neoconservative policies.

The BNC-formation - a document prepared with the intention of guiding the training of Basic Education teachers taking the BNCC as a reference - is,

from the perspective of ^{Sena, Albino and Rodrigues (2021}), subjugated to the demands of neoliberal policies for education and, consequently, promotes a new technical and business conception of public education by understanding knowledge as a commodity and guiding training that makes students “mere market actors, competitive, meritocratic” (p. 8). Thus, BNC-training favors a hollowing out of teacher training courses since the Pedagogical Course Projects and their class and teaching planning must be conducted to meet the neoliberal policy expressed in the BNCC (^{SENA; ALBINO; RODRIGUES, 2021}).

This entire debate, in light of the object under analysis in this text - the organization of study activity in the context of teacher training - highlights the need for defenders of the conception of education and human training honed within historical-cultural psychology to engage in political movements and organizations that fight against the project of society, education, and teacher training directed to peripheral capitalist countries by capitalism in its neoliberal expression. Since, as explained in the previous section and this one, neoliberal logic operates educational policies in opposition to the needs of the majority of society and emancipatory and critical principles of human formation.

5 Impediments to student retention in Higher Education and psychological suffering among university students

Having problematized some of the challenges posed to the carrying out of the study activity, based on an analysis of the history of the university and degree programs, we will move on to the last approach proposed for this discussion: analysis of the study conditions of undergraduate students from the issue of student permanence and the psychological suffering among university students.

Starting from the perspectives defended by historical-cultural psychology, one of the requirements for the planning and execution of teaching activities lies in the knowledge of the subject to whom it is intended to teach, their concrete existence, their needs and specificities of development. Thus, concerns about what to teach and how to teach need to be related to the questioning of who is

being taught. This dynamic was summarized by ^{Martins (2013}) through the triad of form (how to teach) - content (what to teach) - recipient (who to teach). According to the author, none of these elements, devoid of the connections that link them, can, in fact, guide pedagogical work.

For ^{Asbahr (2020}), being clear about which subject we want to train concerns understanding the ethical dimension of pedagogical action. In this field, the author argues that it is about assuming the perspective of the formation of a “class consciousness”, of consciousness as a working class, which, among other things, means a vision of the totality of society in its contradictions and the constitution of a collective project of society organized based on the interests of the working class.

In the context of teacher training, the ongoing crisis also refers, according to ^{Gatti (1992}), to a crisis in the training purpose and methodology for developing this training. Therefore, it is essential that questions related to the guiding purposes of organizing pedagogical work become organizational elements of university education and teacher training spaces. In this way, the questions “which teacher do we want to train? Committed to which society and education project?” need to act as a compass for the entire debate proposed here.

One of the necessary approaches to answer these questions was presented by ^{Gatti (1992}) more than three decades ago. According to the author, a serious problem in the field of teacher training is the consideration of the teacher as an abstract and generic figure, as if he or she could be alien to their concrete conditions of life and profession.

Because we are in line with this position, we will begin this section by highlighting the current profile of undergraduate students offered at Brazilian public universities, even though, as the author herself warns, this characterization is not enough to understand the needs, experiences, possibilities and challenges of graduate students.

Considering, initially, the universe of students at Brazilian public universities, in 2018, 51.6% of university students were black (more than 3 times the number in 2003); 54.6% are women; 70.2% had a family income of, at most, one and a half minimum wages and 26.6% had a family income of less than half a minimum wage (in 1996, this segment was no more than 3%). That year, students from the public network already exceeded 64% (ANDIFES, 2019).

In the scope of degrees, analyzing the socioeconomic profile is a more complex task, since the data presented by ANDIFES (2019) consider the CNPq knowledge areas, making no distinction between bachelor's degree and degree.

In view of this, we take as a reference the research carried out by ^{Locatelli and Diniz-Pereira (2019}) which analyzes the answers given to the student questionnaire of the National Student Performance Exam (ENADE, 2014/2017) of five degrees: pedagogy, history, mathematics, physical education and biology (face-to-face and distance courses, public and private). According to the authors, these courses were chosen because they are degrees with the largest number of students enrolled (72% of enrollments in 2014 and 73.46% in 2017) and because they cover different areas of knowledge.

There is a profile of a working student or one who has there is a need to quickly enter the job market, with low or extremely low family income, a public school graduate, with a history of low academic performance, little access to cultural experiences, and who, for the most part, do not enroll in a degree by choice, but for abandoning the prospect of attending the degree that I really wanted to do (^{LOCATELLI; DINIZ-PEREIRA; 2019}).

For ^{Locatelli and Diniz-Pereira (2019}), the precariousness and devaluation of the teaching career are directly related to this panorama. In this way, the current profile of undergraduate students contradicts our recent past in which teachers were subjects essentially coming from the middle classes of society, even though, as ^{Barros and Bezerra (2020}) discuss, when analyzing this history from a non-hegemonic perspective, it is possible to find non-white and peripheral women and men who, through their struggles and forms of resistance, made a mark in the field of teaching training and performance.

Therefore, in order to understand the profile of Brazilian graduate students, an analysis is necessary that takes into account race, gender and class, as these aspects are essential for understanding the teaching profession in Brazil and, consequently, for knowing the concrete living conditions and work of students enrolled in undergraduate courses.

Thus, the analysis of the current socioeconomic profile of students at public universities shows that the expansion process (intensified in the last decade) was responsible for an unprecedented change in Brazil. According to ^{Leher (2019}), there was a significant increase in enrollment of young black people and those from the most exploited working classes. Still according to the author, this is a major change in the power mechanisms that operationalize the reproduction of social classes in Brazil.

However, it is up to us to problematize the sustainability and solidity of these achievements, since, as ^{Maia (2022}) observes, this scenario was not accompanied by an improvement in working and study conditions within universities. Furthermore, considering the political context of deliberate attack on educational institutions and student inclusion, support and retention policies and the forms of organization of social struggles, among which the student movement is found, it is essential to problematize what conditions have been offered to those students who manage to enter universities in order to satisfactorily complete their training.

In the field of debate about the organization of study activity, these discussions are central, because as previously presented, we started from the assumption that it is necessary to understand the student as an active subject in their process of learning scientific knowledge and developing their skills, theoretical thinking and, therefore, it is necessary not only to recognize the protagonism of these people in their academic and professional lives, but to analyze what possibilities students have of positioning themselves in this way in their training process.

In view of this, it can be seen that, contrary to what was proposed, student protagonism has been deliberately attacked and undermined through the incorporation of neoliberal logic and values by Brazilian public universities, through the co-optation and cooling of student movements and through mechanisms of exclusion of poor students (among whom the majority are black) who, using quota policies, manage to enter the university system, but do not receive the necessary conditions for their permanence and academic success.

For ^{Fernandes (2020}), understanding university as a social need and not as a privilege or intellectual “gift”, presupposes that the State ensures basic conditions so that students can experience university and do without the need to sell their workforce to support their families during their university education.

In this sense, a relevant political action that has intensified the constituent contradictions of Brazilian public universities that, historically, support an elitist profile, logic and functioning, is the National Student Assistance Program (Pnaes). Pnaes presents as its purpose “to expand the conditions for young people to remain in federal public higher education” (BRASIL, 2010) with the following objectives:

- democratize the conditions for young people to remain in federal public higher education;

- minimize the effects of social and regional inequalities on retention and completion of higher education;

- reduce retention and dropout rates; It is

- contribute to the promotion of social inclusion through education.

For ^{Oliveira and Gomes (2019}), however, what is still observed in Brazilian public universities is the expansion of access, but not democratization in the sense of guaranteeing permanence and academic success, even with the existence of this Program. Added to this, the authors identify that the affections and experiences generally related to university students covered by (insufficient) student assistance actions emphasize a place of suffering related to the stigma resulting from belonging to a socially marginalized economic group.

Furthermore, according to ^{Santiago (2014}), student assistance in Brazil, by adopting the logic of the smallest budgetary resource for the largest quantity of assistance, ends up aiming for actions based on a limited, fragmented conception and focused on the most important social segments. impoverished population.

^{Leite (2012}) is more emphatic in his analysis when stating that the focal, residual, compensatory, assistance and fragmented character of the student assistance policy, by not resulting in the universality and completeness of the actions developed, is embodied in “few alms to be disputes for many” (p. 456), reinforcing the maxim of “poor policies for the poor” (468), a process intrinsic to the neoliberal agenda. From the author's perspective, the implementation of the policy not only mischaracterizes student assistance policies, depoliticizing them, but also hinders the struggle and collective organization of students and poses as hidden forms of carrying out work by university students who should be carried out by technical-administrative employees.

In this sense, the neoliberal logic, upon entering the university, colonizes academic spaces and the training experience itself, as it represents a rationality that produces policies that encourage and reproduce the business logic of productivity, competition, profit and the privatization of problems. which are of a social nature (^{LIMA, 2022}).

For ^{Maia (2022}), the incorporation of the neoliberal ethos, governing the performance society, by Brazilian public universities, affected the management and culture of these institutions in the sense of imposing a business logic for organizing this space. In the author's words: “(...) The time of education, the training of future researchers, educational processes, research and knowledge was colonized by the time of the neoliberal economy” (p. 128).

In this process, academic life becomes a source of tension, displeasure and continuous dissatisfaction, which leads to the production of psychological suffering as a central figure in the experience of students in the university environment, showing that one of the pillars of neoliberalism is the production of certain subjectivities, the creation of a “new subject” (^{MAIA, 2022}, p. 103). In this sense, it is necessary to highlight, based on the singularities of university students' experiences of psychological suffering, its social, collective and political dimensions.

In order to understand the extent of this problem, ^{Maia (2022}) uses data produced by the National Association of Directors of Federal Higher Education Institutions (ANDIFES) and the National Forum of Deans of Student Affairs (FONAPRECE). The data presented by the author reveal that, in 2003/4, 36.9% of students said they had mental and emotional health problems. In 2018, the period before the emergence of the new Coronavirus pandemic, the number of university students who reported suffering from mental health issues reached 83.5%.

In this way, when we debate about the conditions that students have to engage in carrying out the study activity, we uncover countless mechanisms of social and academic exclusion and suffering that make it difficult for university students to be part of training processes in order to experience learning and development from a full and integral perspective. In other words, these analyzes invite us to understand the conditions that need to be constructed, within the scope of the experience and reality of university students, so that we can advance in the construction of pedagogical processes close to the principles defended here.

In this sense, strengthening that of spaces for organizing the student movement, the advancement in the provision of student retention policies, the construction of relations among people and with knowledge that are based on the logic of solidarity, collective and individual needs and that consider the time necessary for processes of construction of science, philosophy and art need to become central elements in the institutional projects undertaken by Brazilian public universities.

Added to this, it is necessary to face the social problems that permeate university relations, as in a context of irrationalism, obscurantism, the advancement of new conservatism, the intensification of individualism and a marked attack on collective interests, the guarantee of the necessary conditions for the formation of study activity gains new obstacles, as disillusionment with the possibilities of theoretical-critical understanding and transformation of reality seems to want to position itself as an inevitable end of the current situation.

Thus, the fight against the perverse effects of neoliberal logic on Brazil, the periphery of Capital, on the vast majority of the Brazilian population, on social rights, in general, and the right to school education, specifically, on working conditions and of study existing in Brazilian public universities needs to position itself as one of the driving forces of the clashes necessary to overcome this historical moment marked by serious and profound human, social and educational setbacks. Added to this, in a purposeful way, it is necessary to defend the construction of university training processes that are genuinely open and capable of implementing pedagogical practices involved with broad, emancipated and critical human formation and committed to the transformation of Brazilian society.

6 Final considerations

The analyzes undertaken here serve to problematize the enormous challenges posed to professionals, researchers and activists in the field of higher education who are committed to the organization of teaching that enables the carrying out of the study activity, as recommended by historical-cultural psychology.

As a guiding thread of the argument, we argue that, to face such challenges, it is necessary not only to deepen our understanding of the theoretical-methodological production of the authors who inaugurated this scientific conception, but, essentially, to consider them from our peripheral condition new colonized capitalism.

To this end, we see the need for profound changes in university education and teacher training, especially with regard to confronting the private, elitist, pragmatic and utilitarian logic and ethics that have historically hegemonic control these fields. In this sense, the urgency of dreaming and building another way of experiencing social and university relations is evident, in the name of building projects linked to collective and individual needs in order to favor the processes of emancipation through critical, broad and creative of academic- professional forms to be socialized in higher education.

From the perspective presented here, the expressiveness of the challenges posed makes clear the complexity of the problem analyzed, because, when we consider the advance of neoliberalism based on the intensification of Capital offensive on work, we are faced with a scenario in which hegemonic ideas in Brazil and the world struggle to make neoliberal ideas natural and transform any different political project into something “utopian”, “ideological” or “totalitarian” (^{MAIA, 2022}).

Thus, we understand that the implementation of an academic-professional training such as that guided by historical-cultural psychology cannot happen apart from the fight for a public, secular, quality university, committed to the social needs of the majority of the Brazilian population, with the confrontation Brazil position of dependence in relation to the center of capitalism, with overcoming the effects of neoliberalism on the periphery of the world and with the transformation of our social structures.

As we have shown, a large proportion of undergraduate students are enrolled in private and distance learning courses. In this context, returning to the concept of public is one of the major axes of reflection and current struggles. For ^{Leher (2019}), defending the public university means committing to the production of knowledge that is in favor of breaking with the coloniality of knowledge and power, that is, it is necessary for the public university to produce knowledge intended for public appropriation.

In this sense, it is necessary to fight against the commodification of higher education and basic education, which, for ^{Leher (2019}), presupposes the protagonism of those who advocate the common prevalence, of what is not commodified, of what is committed to good living of all people.

In the context of teacher training, such defense implies advancing the necessary and urgent articulation between universities and basic education, assuming, as ^{Saviani (2011}) argues, the way schools operate as a starting point for organizing the formative process of future teachers. It also presupposes the fight against current legislation that imprisons the curricula of basic education students and teachers in training.

Furthermore, we argue that the discussion about teacher training will be completely useless if precarious working conditions are not denounced and overcome in the name of teacher development policies. For ^{Saviani (2011}), the following are central issues in this fight:

(...) full-time working hours at a single school with time for classes, class preparation, student study guidance, participation in school management and board meetings and community service; and decent salaries that, socially valuing the teaching profession, will attract candidates willing to invest time and resources in long-term training (p. 16).

In summary, for the author, it is impossible to adequately address the problem of teacher training without concomitantly facing the issue of the conditions for carrying out teaching work (^{SAVIANI, 2011}).

In this way, the discussion on teacher training needs to add efforts to the struggles to confront the counter-reforms imposed on Brazilian workers (labor and social security counter-reform) which, in order to fulfill the neoliberal agenda for the periphery of capitalism, makes employment possibilities and modes of employment precarious subsistence and subjectivation of a large part of the Brazilian population, a situation that strongly impacts the teachers’ working conditions.

Furthermore, we reaffirm the inspiring power of historical-cultural psychology essential for the necessary struggles the transformation of Brazilian school education towards a horizon of humanization and emancipation of all people inserted in school institutions, which urgently needs to occur, from the schooling offered in early childhood education to higher education.

To this end, we start from the understanding that the critical appropriation of the theoretical-methodological elaborations forged by Soviet psychology, in light of the historical and scenario challenges of Brazilian education, can announce the essential theoretical syntheses to the political imagination and struggle necessary for the implementation of education as an instrument of the process of social transformation.