The determinants of the neoliberal offensive on the geography curriculum for youth and adult education

Abstract

The process of restructuring of Youth and Adult Education (EJA) in Brazil, in progress after the neoliberal offensive materialized in the 1990s, has consolidated the hegemonic determinants within the scope of educational policies for this type of education, encompassing both the management under the premisses of managerialism, as well as the political-pedagogical and curricular presuppositions for the formation of the "man of new type". This occurs through the consolidation of hegemonic societal values in the curriculum field, impacting the teaching-learning process that gradually turns to the psychophysical adequacy of the working class to the new morphologies of work, inseparable from induced juvenilization, executive decentralization, precarization financing and federal programs that integrate the EJA to technical-vocational education. Thus, through the bibliographical-documentary analysis of the areas of geography and education, this article aims to expose the impacts of the process of bourgeois recomposition on the curricular prescriptions, indicating in its core the intensification of the human capital theory, as well as the reconfiguration of the mechanisms of mediation of class conflict through categorical overvaluation of principles anchored in bourgeois sociability, and how these are based on the teaching-learning relationship in geography in federal EJA programs, taking Projovem as an example. As a result of the analysis of the curriculum of the discriminated program, based on the socio-historical premises and the determinants of the block in power, we verified the materialization of elements for the ratification of the corporate values for the formation of the "new type man", being the Geography, in the field of Human Sciences, instrumented for this purpose.