Contribution to the Discussion of the BNCC 2017

Abstract

We read in the recently published BNCC: "education, a right of all and duty of the State and the family, will be promoted and encouraged with the collaboration of society, aiming at the full development of the person, his preparation for the exercise of citizenship and his qualification for work" (Brasil, 2017). The BNCC establishes the foundations that guide Brazilian public education in early childhood and elementary school. We will focus our analysis of the document on the introduction and especially on the item "The pedagogical foundations of the BNCC, and then make some comments about the general view of education in the document, and the document's treatment of the various areas. We start from the conception that while current education emphasizes the importance of a technicist education, with emphasis on the training of specialized technicians for the labor market, it, in a contradictory way, foresees the presence of elements of a humanistic education - whose meaning we will also need to specify - that appear vertically in the curricula. For us, the damage of such treatment is as much to the so-called human sciences, which are treated as appendages of a technical education, as to the natural sciences, whose development is hindered by a technical conception that sees science not as a branch of human activity that has the potential to broaden knowledge, but as an activity for profit. Finally, this last theme, already problematic in itself, will be discussed at the end with the aim of comparing the sentence placed at the beginning with the general proposal of the BNCC and some of the school practice of recent decades.