Abstract
This paper discusses the market relations which permeate education in general and teacher education, in particular, over the last decades, in their material and symbolic dimensions. The starting point is the analyses of the Project OYE, a proposal of distance education for Spanish-language teachers, announced in 2006 by the Sao Paulo State Department of Education, in partnership with the Santander Group and other Spanish private institutions. Texts and documents related to OYE were read by applying a discursive approach, which identified a process where the State dismisses the universities from their most valuable capitals in the educational field – namely, its academic culture and its pedagogical and scientific knowledge – and overshadows the universities to a merely accessory role in their proposal of teacher education. This process, which we have named a symbolic decapitalization of the universities, comes in a moment when the universities have already been financially decapitalized as a result of public investment being discharged from higher education thus adding up to the symbolic struggle for positions in the educational field. This process enhances the de-professionalization of teachers, that is, it leads to a diminished weight of the universities and higher education in the education of future teachers for basic schooling. Consequently, a technical a model associated with the new technologies is imposed, with hardly any connections with the university practices, the development of teacher autonomy, and intellectual work.
Project OYE; Spanish language teacher education; University decapitalization; Federal Law 11.161/05