Parcerias público-privadas e educação para o trabalho: o “Programa Nacional de Educação Empreendedora – SEBRAE”, em Montes Claros - MG

Abstract

This research analyzes the regulations of the National Entrepreneurship Education Program (PNEE – Programa Nacional de Educação Empreendedora) in the training and professional insertion of young people in high school, established through a public-private partnership between the Brazilian System of Support for Micro and Small Enterprises (SEBRAE – Sistema Brasileiro de Apoio a Micro e Pequenas Empresas) and State Education Systems throughout Brazil. Partnerships, such as this one, have intensified in the country as a result of the neoliberal reforms of the State - imposed since the 1990s, in response to the cyclical crisis of capital - which proclaim the withdrawal of the State from the provision of public activities, placing them in the charge of the private sector. It is questioned, therefore, the implications of the PNEE/SEBRAE in the professional training/insertion of young people, considering the challenges posed by the world of work in the contemporary world. The method of analysis is a dialectical-historical materialistic one, with a quantitative-qualitative approach, having as its procedures the literature review on the history of educational policies for High School and Vocational Education, the public-private partnerships in public schools, and the required relations among the world of work, entrepreneurship, and education, as well as among curriculum, ideology, and power. We conducted documentary research comparing the PNEE/SEBRAE proposal and the Political-Pedagogical Projects (PPPs) of two state schools in Montes Claros-MG. The field study included interviews with teachers and managers of these schools and with the local coordinator of the Program, in order to deepen the theme in question, regarding the process of implementation of the Program and its reverberations in the school curriculum and in the vocational training of young people. An online questionnaire was applied to the graduates who attended the Program in High School, from 2016 to 2020, in an attempt to apprehend the marks of this training in their professional lives. The results indicate that the discourse of entrepreneurship, conveyed by SEBRAE through the PNEE, ratifies the self-responsibility of the young worker before the flexibilization/precariousness of the labor world and that the participation in the Program, by itself, does not offer effective possibilities of professional insertion and income generation/increase. Furthermore, the latent mercantilization of education through the establishment of public-private partnerships was found to interfere directly in the school curriculum (curricular content, methodologies, teacher training, and learning evaluation), naturalizing the private-business logic in public educational institutions. The discussions about social public policies and the responsibility of the State in the materialization of these policies are emptied out, a reality underlying a neoliberal project of reconfiguration of the State's role as a new model of social regulation by the current model of neoliberal capitalism.