NATIONAL CURRICULUM GUIDELINES FOR THE EJA:

TERRITORIALIZATION AND CONTEXT

Abstract

This article proposes the development of reflections on youth and adult education (EJA), understanding them from a vision of totality as workers in the context of economic neoliberalism of the 21st century. For this, we carried out a documentary research on the National Curricular Guidelines for EJA (2000) with a view to the textual analysis of the same in line with articles and works of authors affiliated with historical and dialectical materialism who have been studying educational policies and/or EJA in the light of the relationship between work and education. Neoliberalism in the Brazilian context of the 21st century is characterized, among other aspects, by the attribution of exchange value to fundamental rights such as education, health, housing, leisure. Education, in its different stages, becomes a promising market, as well as the certification of basic schooling for millions of workers as a condition for access and consumption of higher education courses sold by numerous higher education institutions. The results from the documentary and bibliographic studies indicate that the EJA represents, on the one hand, a territory for the training of workers prepared for the demands of the labor market in the stage of globalized capitalism, and means, in addition, a space for returning to school for those who who had their right to schooling denied. On the other hand, it can mean a territory of struggle and resistance, strategic for the formation of the subject with class consciousness.