Life as a Project: The homo economicus Pedagogy and the Initiatives to Promote the “Spirit of Capitalism” through Public Education

Abstract

The article focuses on the symbolic matrix that underlies an Integral Education Program idealized by business elites, which is currently disseminated throughout Brazil by the agency of nonprofit organizations linked to the corporate realm, in "partnership" with the State. Such a model of public education was constituted with conceptions, world views and values proper to economically successful agents. From the symbolic authority implied in their "managerial capital", they assume a "pedagogical role" aiming the reform of the dispositions to action of public-school students. The analysis of the pedagogy of the homo economicus, based on the notion of "project of life", brought elements to clarify the agency of "corporate philanthropy" in the expanding model of “integral education”. The concentration of economic, political, social, and symbolic capital of economic elites allows them to transform initiatives based on their visions and beliefs in national scope public policies. They seek, therefore, to construct certain economic dispositions through public education and, as they attribute "success" to the rationally executed will, they neglect the social conditions of the breeding of such dispositions. Therefore, if the initiatives analyzed exist within the context of a broader rationality – named neoliberal for conciseness - they have privileged artificers and bear the marks of a specific ethos, conceived, nevertheless, as universal or at least universalizable. However, the homo economicus, if there is one, is historical and marked by class dynamics, in which some agents self-impute the design of public policies within which other agents are thought of as apprentices of an ethos as a nomos.