O ensino de sociologia na educação profissional do Paraná durante a reação e ascensão conservadora entre 2016 e 2023

Abstract

In this research, we investigate the ideological disputes present in educational policies resulting from the counter-reforms promoted since 2016, focusing on the imposition of the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC) and its incorporation by the State Department of Education of Paraná up to the end of 2023. We use official documents related to this process as primary sources, conducting content analysis to interrogate the objectivity of their prescriptions and to denounce the subaltern position that Sociology education has been relegated to in Professional Education in Paraná. This is evidenced by the unequal and hierarchical distribution of instructional hours offered in the curriculum matrices of the “New High School”, where the content of the social sciences has been drastically reduced, despite the apparent increase in total class hours. Considering this process as a reflection of contested projects, we seek to understand the rationality that underpins them. To this end, we structure our analysis around three dimensions: 1) a set of 144 official national and state documents; 2) studies and secondary sources related to the observed themes; and 3) Álvaro Vieira Pinto’s theory of national reality consciousness. This theory enables us to understand the representations of reality present in the documents through a dialectical dynamic between naïve and critical consciousness. While the former ignores the objective conditions of reality and reproduces the dominant logic, the latter seeks to understand the foundations of social structures and guide collective projects for transformation. Thus, by organizing the documents around the categories of objectivity, rationality, historicity, and totality – key elements of critical consciousness – we identify, in the historical process conditioning the existence of these materials, four main moments, which even precede the current counter-reform. The first is marked by “Incipient Democratization” (1988–2002), followed by “Inequality in Evidence” (2003–2013), interrupted by the “Conservative Reaction” (2014–2018), and culminating in the “Reactionary Rise” (2019–2023). In this last phase, the hegemonic project, having occupied the spaces of decision-making and educational policy design, initiates the implementation of a disintegrated education for the working class, hijacking the previously constructed emancipatory, omnilateral meaning, and promoting a curricular paradigm grounded in several traits of naïve consciousness – especially through what is called the “Technical and Professional Training Pathway” and the “Life Project”. However, considering the categories of activity, freedom, and nationality of critical consciousness, we also note that the objects of analysis are constantly undergoing transformation during these periods. This is because, articulated across multiple instances of the totality, antagonistic classes engage in a dialectical dynamic in which they struggle for control of public policies to impose their interests in their formulation. Therefore, we emphasize that the subordinated position currently occupied by Sociology education in Paraná’s Professional Education is not definitive – it is under dispute and its emancipatory meaning can be reclaimed, provided that strategies of association with other totalities that have also had their spaces seized are mobilized. These totalities nevertheless survive amid the violence of the exploiting class, as is the case with Hip Hop, through Brazilian RAP, as well as other fields of knowledge that have likewise been marginalized.