Nova direita e educação superior no brasil: incidências, desafios e resistências contemporâneas

Abstract

This study deals with the challenges posed by the ideology of the new right to Brazilian higher education policy from the post-2016 coup period onwards, in particular, in the governments of Michel Temer (2016-2018) and Jair Bolsonaro (2019- 2022). The starting point was the understanding of the links between ideology and education and the understanding of the new right as the amalgam between neoliberalism and neoconservatism as a basis for identifying the challenges and impacts on higher education in the dynamics of Brazilian dependent capitalism. Guided by a historical-dialectic materialist perspective, the thesis had the following specific objectives: to situate higher education policy in the context of contemporary transformations of capital and in the particularities of Brazilian economic-social formation; problematize how the advance of the new right affects higher education policy in the Brazilian reality; and point out the collective resistance to confront the neo-rightist project in public education and universities. For this, the qualitative research focused on bibliographic and documentary research, for the first, scientific articles published in the period 2016-2023 were selected and in the documentary research, institutional, organizational, official documents and documents produced by unions were analyzed. From this, it was verified the existence of an offensive by the neo-rightist project on higher education in which public universities were in the “targets” of the so-called “cultural war” undertaken by the Temer and Bolsonaro governments, more explicitly in the latter. This project had three main axes of action: the deepening of educational privatism, in which the Future-se Project is the main initiative; in ideological control and interventionism in universities and federal institutes; and in fiscal adjustment and defunding of higher education. However, even with the various challenges, the resistance and struggles of collective subjects whose flags of struggle are the defense of education and public universities with a social function, in-person, free and with state funding, have not been eliminated.