Plataformização da educação básica, neoliberalismo e trabalho docente: mercantilização, controle e perda de autonomia

Abstract

The present article discusses how platformization is transforming Basic Education. This phenomenon is not limited by technological tools, but involves the adoption of corporate systems that standardize contents, centralizes pedagogical decisions, monitors teachers and students and collects data as a strategic resource. Such processes, often driven by public-private partnerships, promote forms of indirect privatization of public education and compromise pedagogical autonomy. The main impacts fall on teaching labor, as teachers have their autonomies reduced, are evaluated through algorithmical metrics and are subjected to the intensification and fragmentation of tasks, in addition to increased surveillance and bureaucratization. This context contributes to the precarization of work, the loss of pedagogical creativity, and the risk of emptying the school’s critical character. Inspired by Marx and Saviani, the text argues that platformization reinforces the commodification of education, turning it into a space for the reproduction of social inequalities and a source of private profit, guided by numerical results at the expense of the integral formation of individuals. By reducing teachers to the role of executors of pre-structured tasks, the social function of the school as a space for the socialization of knowledge and, consequently, for the promotion of critical consciousness is weakened. Criticism of platformization processes, therefore, should not be confused with a critique of the use of information technologies in school education, but rather targets the ways in which such processes are employed to distort the aims of education and undermine its formative role.