Educação, infância e neoliberalismo: uma análise crítica da BNCC à luz da teoria histórico-cultural

Abstract

This study aims to analyze how childhood is understood in the early years of elementary school based on an analysis of the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC), seeking to understand the contribution of its guidelines to student education in the contemporary context of Brazilian education, which is deeply rooted in systematic inequality and guided by neoliberal logic. It starts from the assumption that, although progressive and universal in nature, the document operates on a more adaptive level, guided by skills training, favoring individual accountability and the pathologization of childhood. The analysis presented is based on a historical-cultural perspective. This text uses qualitative document-based research as its methodology. The data analyzed reveal contradictions between the normative proposal of the BNCC and the concrete conditions of Brazilian education, especially in historically disadvantaged regions. It is observed that the centrality attributed to competencies and skills overlooks material, institutional, and educational inequalities, shifting responsibility for structurally conditioned processes to the individual and the school, contributing to a conception of childhood and education that is displaced from its social environment, and distant from Brazilian social reality, reinforcing mechanisms of adaptation and control to the expense of critical and emancipatory education.