On legitimation and critique: The disputes about the Brazilian learning standards

Abstract

This paper analyzes the recent disputes about the so-called Brazilian Learning Standards. Unlike other approaches to the subject, the text seeks to integrate the relational and discursive dimensions to analyze them and employs a particular appropriation of both Pierre Bourdieu and the Sociology of Critique. The paper is based on document analysis, interviews and field observations in public hearings and events promoted by family and corporate foundations in Brazil and the USA. After presenting the social space of the dispute around the National Learning Standards, the article discusses eight strategies of consensualization established by the agents who advanced it, focusing on the discursive concertation which they composed and on the practical-discursive agency of those foundations. Next, the paper examines the criticisms made by agents against the document and analyzes the relations between critique and legitimation in the process of creating the national curriculum standard. In light of the empirical findings, the conclusion of the text points out the convenience of a multidimensional approach to social disputes.