By LEONARDO SACRAMENTO*
MBL, Brasil Paralelo and Fundação Lemann together in training unemployed workers
Why is the São Paulo State Department of Education using videos from Brasil Paralelo and MBL?[I] Why did bank and billionaire foundations, such as Fundação Lemann, Instituto Itaú Social and Instituto Ayrton Sena, set up shop in the Ministry of Education? What is the relationship between Brasil Paralelo and MBL with Fundação Lemann, Instituto Itaú Social and Instituto Ayrton Sena? What is the relationship between reactionary revisionism and neoliberalism? What is the articulation of bourgeoisie institutes and far-right “movements” with the proposals for Integral Education, Common National Curricular Base (BNCC) and New Secondary Education?
The left defends a broad and humanist education ontologically linked to work, the arts, philosophy and understanding of reality, that is, an education whose principle is work as the element that makes us human. The ruling class, on the other hand, has always imposed education for employment, or rather, adaptation to employment. To train, in the light of Taylorism, Fordism and Toytism, the productive worker. However, we are under neoliberalism.
The new educational proposal of capital is to train for “non-employment”, as they no longer exist. In this way, neoliberalism transforms comprehensive education into full-time education, seeking to fill the time of unemployed young people with a matrix distinct from the partial formation under Fordist/Taylorist and/or Toyotist accumulation. Partiality is no longer enough.
The neoliberal situation is complex. The expectation of the younger generation to surpass their parents' income, at least reproducing their jobs, in accordance with the dream of the middle class of Social Welfare States in central post-war countries, no longer exists. For at least two generations, income has fallen compared to parents. If previously specific sectors of the working class had access to their own home, reasonably stable employment and a salary with good purchasing power, today generations of young people are crowded together without any expectation of positive class reproduction, resulting in the rise of far-right fascist ideologies over young white men, like neo-Nazism.
Simplistic explanations worked on social networks and deep web, such as those that blame immigration in central countries and affirmative policies in Brazil, are openly propagated as a false paradox to the sphinx of the good liberal who uses fascism to approve ultra-neoliberal reforms. Bankers also compete for young people and, not paradoxically, in practice they ally themselves with far-right movements linked to the essence of any neo-Nazi group, such as MBL and Brasil Paralelo.
Denialism is a political method. It is only possible to deny capitalist exploitation under the hegemony of rentier accumulation through the denial of history (historical materialism), transforming the individual into his own master, or as Friedrich Hayek said, into the sovereign individual, including (why not?) opposition to the sovereignty of the nation-state.
For the foundations of bankers and billionaires, the “poor” would lack study and education to generate income, resurrecting apologetic precepts of the theory of human capital, now inspired by the theology of prosperity. This new proposal dialogues with the defense of a bifurcated school, one for the working class and another for the traditional middle class and the bourgeoisie, at the same time that it approaches urgent problems of the working class, such as keeping children away from violence. Therefore, it is politically efficient.
Full-time education, the Common National Curricular Base and the New Secondary Education are based on utilitarian, solipsistic and fragmented theories and proposals, with the presentation of anti-scientific proposals that mythologize reality, such as entrepreneurship. To this end, they are based on a workshop logic, in which everything can be school knowledge through a mechanical transposition of business ideology to the working class (“small boss”).
Teachers should no longer have training, as they must be versatile, practical and with “fluid” training, resulting in an enormous fragmentation of reality that further alienates the student by making misery a product of their choices.
Science no longer exists. It is a denialist teaching. This explains the use of videos from Brasil Paralelo and MBL, since now non-scientific knowledge is the ideal pedagogical parameter for the class's adaptation to neoliberal exploitation (precariousness, somatization of diseases and lack of perspective). It turns out that it's not just the videos. The blow has already been dealt.
The implosion of the scientific bases of pedagogical work is legalized and legitimized in the Common National Curricular Base and in the New Secondary Education. These two measures relativize scientific knowledge, turning it into knowledge and skills to be learned by young people in a world that would be computerized and technological. If Brazil goes through a process of deindustrialization and denationalization of its economy, it doesn't matter, because the technology designed and worked on is common sense, precarious platforms like Uber and Ifood and cell phone applications. In other words, it is the radicalization of a fetishistic approach to technology submitted to the perspective of the consumer and the precarious worker formed by the ideology of the small boss.
Historiographical, historical and sociological denialism is fundamental for the dominant social segments because it naturalizes the position they have, transmitting the liberal-scholastic idea that they achieved their status in an open and fair dispute over a meritocratic system that formed a society based on the “hierarchy”. of capabilities.”[ii] Authoritarianism in the choice of profession, for example, would only occur if the State intervened, never as a product of economic, social and political relations.
Thus, we witness the glorification by the liberal ideology of the figures of the nineteenth-century slave heir and the billionaire savior while the same ideology justifies the opposition to labor legislation, quotas and Bolsa-Família, refuting any State intervention (authoritarianism), including for saving lives in environmental and climatic events, as occurs in Rio Grande do Sul.
This is where MBL and Brasil Paralelo come into play. Denial of the role of slavery, whitening, segregation and inequality in the concentration of capital and private property reinforces the ideology of the dominant class that can no longer disguise the ills of neoliberalism, at the same time that it needs to ideologically naturalize its capitals hiding their origins and their “sins”. At the limit, there is the defense of the denial of capital's exploitation of labor, whose defense of the ills of capitalism in its rentier phase fetishizes the “selected and strong” individual (social Darwinism), transforming them into a positive curriculum for young people with an education adaptive for non-employment. Let’s call it meritocracy fetishism.
Before biological and physical denialism, which denies the vaccine and the shape of the planet, historical, historiographical and sociological denialism was, for years, a weapon of struggle for the ruling class used by groups that became popular with strong financing from capital and the help of algorithms. from the private platforms of foreign billionaires. Legitimized, denialism entered the curriculum articulated at the Ministry of Education by private law foundations linked to billionaires aiming to naturalize rentier accumulation.
The activities of these large banks cannot be understood as they normally appear, in which they would be limited to gaining resources from departments and ministries and exempting them from income tax. These are absolutely marginal aspects of the work of billionaire foundations. Often, the activities of these institutes do not involve any transfer of public resources.[iii] It makes no sense to think with this mechanistic variable, as no sector accumulates more than banks and rentiers through the exemption of profits and dividends and exorbitant bank and interest rates. The interest is in the formation of the neoliberal worker.
This can be seen in the proposals of the government of the state of São Paulo, which has the network that has made the most progress in such policies due to its uninterrupted application for 30 years. In this text, we reproduce a proposal for the state network’s “leadership” class for high school students. The first three photos are from the “leadership” class, dealing with a non-scientific concept, resilience. Here the student is prepared to endure not being employed and convinced to understand reality based on their life and “choices”.
Photo 1
Photo 2
Photo 3
The author used (photo 2), Diane L. Couti, is a coaching (journalist) who wrote an article called How Resilience Works na Harvard Business Review. There is no citation of scientific data in the short article, which is journalistic and pamphlet. The journalist's references are phrases from CEOs of large companies in which a thought from CEO Dean Becker is highlighted: “More than education, more than experience, more than training, a person's level of resilience will determine who will be successful and who will fail. That’s true in getting sick with cancer, it’s true in the Olympics, and it’s true in the boardroom.” What is the scientific parameter of this nonsense normally uttered by coaching?
The conclusion of the class (photo 3) requires students to start applying what they have learned, “resilience”, facing “reality” and seeking “meaning” to “improvise”. Reality, a product of production relations, exploitation and inequality, is mystified because it must be grasped to be faced, or better yet, accepted as it is to be supported. Learning, understanding and analysis no longer exist. Improvisation, in turn, is a poorly made figure of speech for the student to “get by”.
The following three photos show what the sociology class would be like.
Photo 4
Photo 5
Photo 6
Linked to the “leadership” class, students are convinced in the sociology class to believe that “anxiety” and “depression” are the result of “consumerism” because they would live in a “consumer society”. Here we literally have the idea proclaimed by any think tanks neoliberal that there would be no social classes, but only individual consumers, in which society would not have any collective dimension as it would be subject to consumer tastes and the pricing of goods in relation to supply and demand, the determining variable of which would be consumption. Therefore, those who have power are the consumers to the detriment of citizenship emanating from the 1988 Constitution (social policies), the worker and the political movement.
The existence of classes, racism, real estate speculation, land concentration, capital accumulation, exploitation, etc. is denied. Even milder concepts, such as gentrification, are expelled from the teaching material. The sociology class dialogues with the “leadership” class in that it requires the student to practice new adaptive behavior and adaptable to “reality”, with “ethical conduct in the face of the challenges of the consumer society”. If there is any struggle, it is as a consumer, choosing not to consume products from companies “that harm their employees, society or the environment”. The possessive pronoun “yours” giving ownership rights to the company was not a mistake.
If the student as an individual manages to overcome “consumerism” through the power of the mind (quackery), that is, not wanting to consume what he is convinced (suggested) through advertisements from large industrial-financial complexes since he was born, he will not have “depression” and “anxiety”. The implicit logic is that of a self-help class, not adorning it with the most basic data: the social group that commits suicide the most is black female workers, those who, demonstrably, have lower income, worse jobs, lower consumption and, therefore, , what the material calls “consumerism”. The material irresponsibly establishes a criminal cause and effect relationship between consumption and depression, in which depression could be avoided with “responsible” consumption (sic!).
The entry of Brasil Paralelo and MBL is a coherent consequence of neoliberal denialism. In practice, such far-right movements have already been present in Brazilian education for some years, especially in the Ministry of Education, officially represented by Fundação Lemann, Instituto Itaú Social and Instituto Ayrton Senna. It is an education proposal for non-employment supported exclusively by scientific denialism as a didactic-pedagogical method and national curriculum matrix. It is the expression of the victory of neoliberalism.
Leonardo Sacramento He is a professor of basic education and pedagogue at the Federal Institute of São Paulo. Author, among other books, of Discourse on White: Notes on Racism and the Apocalypse of Liberalism (Mall).
Notes
[I] Available in https://oglobo.globo.com/brasil/educacao/noticia/2024/05/06/depois-de-aula-com-material-do-mbl-rede-estadual-de-sp-usa-brasil-paralelo-como-material-pedagogico.ghtml.
[ii] The term is present in the Manifesto of the Pioneers of New Education, from 1932.
[iii] “The Lemann Foundation defended the cooperation agreement between the MEC (Ministry of Education) and the NGO MegaEdu, financed by the group linked to Jorge Paulo Lemann. In a note published on Monday (September 2, 25), the foundation says that the partnership 'does not involve any type of transfer of resources'”. Available in https://www.poder360.com.br/educacao/fundacao-lemann-defende-parceria-de-ong-com-o-governo/#:~:text=A%20Funda%C3%A7%C3%A3o%20Lemann%20defendeu%20o,tipo%20de%20transfer%C3%AAncia%20de%20recursos%E2%80%9D.
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