Education, Curriculum and Political Culture: knowing the processes, resist and participate

Abstract

This paper tries to make the reader reflect on influences and opportunities among curriculum, education, and political culture based on our formative perceptions as professors and student perspectives. It also discusses Brazilian citizenship in the present moment. We understand that neoliberal and conservative trends have been accentuated by using the discourse of economic growth as a form of democracy, inclusion, and improvement of the population’s quality of life. Such interests have deviated from justice and egalitarian social advances, education, and cultural politics. We see authoritarianism creating alluring methods to guarantee growth and accumulation of capital under the ownership of an international elite and colonial representatives. In a market- state relation, we take the construction processes of the new curricular standards as an example of a policy that undermines education and culture policy that needs to be problematized or reversed. As a way to counter this historical course, we pursue the awareness of the importance of political education and increasing the political act of education, by understanding the reality along with strengthening the participation of the majority of people who are affected, in education and politics. We broach the notion of curricular justice to daily and close dimensions, in dialectic with the political macro contexts. We refer to this study in pedagogical praxis and a comprehensive problematized methodology, based on Popular Education in its decolonial emphasis. When it comes to the minimal state, competitive and technical education has become an end in itself and has acted against education as a means of awareness and politicization. According to the Popular Education radically politicized, we understand that the culture of participation means being an active part of the social totality, not being able to grant for the adaptation and reproduction of conservative interests that present themselves as new. Participation is not adherence or concession, but a fundamental component of pedagogical praxis socialization.