PEDAGOGICAL PROSELYTISM AND IDEOLOGICAL CONVERSION IN THE (BRAZILIAN) HIGH SCHOOL REFORM

Abstract

Amidst a political context of democratic decline in Brazil, the imposition of an educational model through the High School Reform enticed political disputes and produced a markedly ideological debate on education. With the use of video commercials, the government sought to answer critics by “instructing” the Brazilian people on the aspects of the reformist proposal, which included the creation of school districts and broader curricular choice. Using discourse analysis theories by Mikhail Bakhtin (2003; 2009) and Michel Foucault (2000, 2009), and a methodological approach of discourse based on a post-colonial perspective, in the sense proposed by Homi Bhabha (1998), this article aims to call attention to the neoliberal and neocolonial marks present in the Reform propaganda. Understanding media as a pedagogical device (FISCHER, 2002), we can observe that pedagogical proselytism, ideological conversion and production of hegemony were the main objectives of the Reform advertising pieces; being that ideology is here conceived as a discursive power that generates forms of subjectivation, as well as an operator of power/knowledge relations within cultural and educational policy making.