The technification of Human Sciences in curricular policies for secondary education: the pedagogizing of educational knowledge and the institution of a new moral economy

Abstract

Educational reforms have been ascribing centrality to the curricula, further affirming them as a place capable of reducing issues and stamping out educational inequality, as well as propagating a viewpoint that opposes pedagogical discipline in regard to educational renewal. Supported by the notion of governmentality, we have been addressing these documents as devices that project the desirable conduct and tensely produce neoliberal subjectivities through the propagation of values that endorse the private sphere and economical concepts related to the status of the source of tenets that must not only regulate the State, but also modify its purpose. The excerpt analysis covered in this study, concerning the National Curriculum Guidelines and the Common National Curriculum Base oriented towards secondary education, stems from a documental and qualitative research, substantiated by a post-foundational perspective, and it seeks to ponder over the paths taken that, ultimately, limit Human Sciences, due to the deterioration of school subjects and the pedagogizing of the curriculum. We emphasize that such process, depicted as an attempt to give meaning akin to synonyms of competencies for educational knowledge, is grounded in a moral economy logic that exacerbates personal interests and individual desires, thus depreciating egalitarianism and impersonal standpoints, a context in which Human Sciences, if resignified, assume a pivotal role.