Subject in education for the twenty-first century: A discursive analysis of the impacts of PISA in Brazil

Abstract

This chapter explores the external assessment production of subjects in education for the twenty-first century. It argues that the external assessment, PISA, is establishing a “new” regime of truth regarding subjects in education that will be understood as discursive practices of tension between success and failure. The corpus consists of the discourses that are related to the documents of PISA on the website of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and on the website of the Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisas Educacionais Anísio Teixeira (INEP) in Brazil. The methodological framework is the Post-critical perspective within Discourse Analysis and Foucault’s genealogical studies. The findings of the analysis point to the production of a future generation, conceived as global citizen and transformed into scientific objects by PISA whose truth can be told in numbers which give the illusion of transparency. In relation to Brazil, what PISA does is only giving international visibility to the problems we already know, and it does not give a solution.