Zumbification and “Inverse Zombie Apocalypse” in the context of the implementation of and resistance to the Reform of Secondary Education

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze how discourses related to entrepreneurship are inserted into the context of the High School Reform and the BNCC in Brazil, promoting a contextualization of these discourses in a broader context of neoliberal reforms in the country and the intensification of neoliberal rationality. To this end, discourse analysis was used, with the objects of this analysis being Law 13.415/2017, the National Common Curriculum Base (BNCC), the Implementation Guide for the New High School, the plenary sessions of the Chamber of Deputies and the Federal Senate aimed at voting on Law 13.415 and party notes on the approval of this law. As a secondary objective, the pedagogical concepts underlying the student occupations of 2016 were analyzed. From the analysis, it emerged that there is a strong presence of the discursive formation of entrepreneurship in all these selected documents, associated with neoliberal rationality, especially with regard to the defense of flexibility, protagonism, the development of skills aligned with a life project and the encouragement of dreams - as long as they are dreams previously formatted by capital. These discourses make individuals completely responsible for their future and their employability, individualizing social problems, while denying emancipatory perspectives for the future and promoting a vision of the present that ignores contradictions and tends to reproduce conservatism. However, there was a very different conception of education in the student occupations of 2016, which focused on revolutionary pedagogies.