Political and epistemological dimensions of the conservative misconception in education: the Brazilian common core in the context of national curricula

Abstract

In this article we interrogate the policies of national curricula, their ideals and possibilities of “success”. Facing the promises of equal learning, we consider relevant to bring previous research and knowledge that we have woven with the former about the political misunderstandings and epistemological weaknesses of these proposals. Telling the struggles that have unfolded in Brazil in recent years focusing on the implications of the 2016 Coup d’ État for educational policies has allowed us to reinforce that everyday life, within schools or not, is woven in a permanent interlocution between different instances of knowledges, values ​​and possibilities, as spacetimes of creation and reinvention of the world and not as receptacles. The text is a defense of the public education and its actors. Therefore, a first possible conclusion is that to investigate everyday life in the schools is an important political-epistemological action, since it constitutes a means to incorporate into the field of curriculum other possibilities of understanding the complexity that is inherent both to school everyday life and to the curricula that are created within. We also learn from this type of research that life is not controllable, that national curricula are doomed to failure, and that their proposition is, in addition to being politically excluding, academically devoid of reasonable foundation.

Keywords: National curricula; Political and epistemological un-separability; Everyday life; Public education