Limits of commodification and the deepening of entrepreneurship in public education in Brazil

Abstract

In this text we seek to analyze the limits of the process of absolute commodification of public education in view of the fundamental antinomy between the concepts of "right to education" (use value) and "commodity" (exchange value). Empirically, we resort to documentary analysis to highlight the concreteness of these limits, but also signal the relative inadequacy of the use of the concepts of privatization and privatization when taken as a synonym for the in totum transformation of public school into private school. Although it has advanced in recent years regarding the expansion of the educational offer, there has also been progress in the forms of privatization in the configurations of managerialism and educational entrepreneurship. Regarding professional education, the role of the private sector expanded differently to the rest of basic education due to the direct offer of short courses financed by the state government through programs and projects, such as Pronatec. And we conclude that in addition to the preservation of increasingly commodified spaces of life and public services in general, the accelerated process of entrepreneurship of education has justified, on the one hand, the privatization of the supply of school supplies and on the other hand, validate the damming of the expansion of the financing of the public school offer that would lead to the progressive process of taxation and strengthening of the State in social policies.