"Torna-te hábil e competente ou não tardarás a ver o que te acontece": Neoliberalismo e formação em Psicologia

Abstract

A pedagogical approach underscored by the concepts of competencies and skills points the way for Brazilian educational policy on many fronts, in many ways and at all levels of education, from primary to higher education. Designed from distinct theoretical and epistemological matrices (behaviorist, functionalist, constructivist), but integrated for convencience with the historical, social, political, economic and cultural developments of capitalism after productive restructuring, it proposes to mobilize “cognitive schemes” and “relevant, creative and effective attitudes” for “situational” impasses; not by chance that it articulates the sphere and times of Education, in order to establish itself as a kind of ordering reference for teaching work, both in syllabuses or teaching plans and in students performance assessment and curricular guidelines. In this research, we set the objective of understanding the historical determinants on the introduction of a competency-based pedagogy in undergraduate Psychology programs and its appropriation by active or experienced teachers. Specifically, we seek to understand the conceptions and parameters of academic and professional training that underpin the criteria and styles of personal and professional trajectories, adoption and representations of the ideas of competencies/skills, as well as positions adhering to and resistant to these concepts within the established dynamics of labor organization. Our theoretical framework is supported by the contributions of authors belonging to the first generation of Critical Theory of Society, mainly Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, whose writings of philosophical and sociological intervention raise the strangeness of a sociability in wich people are convinced to think of themselves as central agents of academic and professional success or failure. The argument that each person needs to become skilled and competent demonstrates the neoliberal spirit, wich avoids an interpretation of the concrete conditions that hinder the realization of human dignity, forces the individual to adapt to society, inducing the acceptance of a determined impotence considered in subjective terms, ratifying the ideology as a manifest lie for the benefit of an administered society, conformed to an opressive and dominating logic of people and groups. To achieve the objectives of this qualitative and exploratory research, we decided to conduct semi-structured interviews with six teaching professionals who were willing to participate out of interest or need to give a word to what they capture. Based on the interlocution exercise made possible by the meetings, the empirical material led us to develop four categories of analysis. The first one is guided by a reflection on the higher education experience nowadays; the second presents us with a general framework of appropriations of the concepts of competencies and skills, as well as their constitutive principles and possible problems; the third is articulated with the previous one, by addressing the aspect of practice, of training directed at work processes, the focus of competence; while the fourth and last refers to the dilemmas that arise when people are called to adjustment, but also tested to the limits of what they can tolerate from the orders of neoliberal pedagogy translated into appeals of competence as a figure of false education. We argue that it is plausible to extract from the critique on the instrumental reduction of cultural formation some elements that refers, on the one hand, to an analysis of the technicalities alien to the formative experience and, on the other, to the artifices - sometimes silent - of individual resistance, sharpened by painful and inevitable contact with awareness of contradictions. We conclude by using Adorno’s conceptual constellation as a pertinent reading operator for approaching the object that we will examine, admitting limits to emancipatory projects without ignoring vital oppositional movements; and the possibility that the latter inspire movements in the field of Education.