“Aprender a empreender”: o projeto de educação do SEBRAE para a educação básica pública

Abstract

This study, which deals with the relationship between entrepreneurship and education, investigates SEBRAE's “entrepreneurial education” project for public basic education. The guiding question of the research was systematized as follows: What is the political-ideological perspective of SEBRAE's National Program of Entrepreneurial Education for Basic Education? What is the pedagogical content of the project for primary education? What is SEBRAE's conception of the work of teachers involved in its project? The general objective of the research is to identify and analyze the foundations of SEBRAE's “entrepreneurial education” project for elementary education, seeking to identify its political-ideological and pedagogical aspects for human formation and the organization of public basic education. The epistemic basis of the research is dialectical historical materialism. The documentary corpus consisted of didactic books produced by SEBRAE for the final years of elementary school (6th to 9th grade). The material was analyzed according to the documental research procedures in light of the following categories of content: human conception, work and school education. The research proves that SEBRAE's entrepreneurship project for school education aims to spread the ideology of entrepreneurship in elementary education to affirm the capitalist sociability reference of life and work. In this line, SEBRAE affirms: i) an extremely restricted perspective on the educational work, configuring the teacher as diffuser and legitimator of his project; ii) legitimizing the pedagogy of competencies, depriving the social function of the school; iii) the development of “competencies” linked to the “business world”, pointing to a perspective of restrictive and pragmatic training for public school students referenced in the idea of educating for survival; iv) individualism as a moral principle and associativism as business, affirming the state model with minimal functions on the “social question”. This means that the SEBRAE project is committed to the formation of the worker-entrepreneur citizen, which implies a restricted and unilateral formation of the human being for employability or for flexible working relationships.