A history of Financial Education in the Basic Mathematics curriculum (2005-2022): rationalities and competing training projects.
Social History; Financial Education; Homo oeconomicus; Homo consumens; Novum homo socialis; Teacher Education.
Financial Education has occupied, in recent decades, an increasingly significant place in national policies, especially since the international recommendations disseminated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) from 2005 onwards. In Brazil, this movement intensified over the following years and culminated in the inclusion of Financial Education in the Mathematics curriculum of Basic Education through the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC), in a context marked by educational reforms and the strengthening of neoliberal rationalities. Given this scenario and the need to problematize the naturalization of Financial Education as school content, this study seeks to understand which conceptions of Financial Education — market-oriented, behavioral, or critical — are evidenced in the trajectory of Brazilian official documents. Its general objective is to construct a historical interpretation of Financial Education in the Mathematics curriculum of Basic Education in Brazil, within a time frame that begins with the 2005 OECD Recommendation and extends to the Bolsonaro administration (2005-2022). It is hypothesized that this inclusion does not occur in a neutral manner, but rather is associated with the adaptation of individuals to the demands of the capitalist system, in a process in which the school curriculum, understood as a space of dispute and also as an expression of Ideological State Apparatuses, may contribute to the production of subjectivities adjusted to dominant economic rationalities. In this movement, the formative actions linked to Financial Education may aim at the formation of a homo oeconomicus, understood both from the Foucauldian perspective of the entrepreneur of the self and from the Bourdieusian perspective of a subject whose economic dispositions are historically produced and socially incorporated, as well as of a homo consumens, especially from Bauman’s perspective, to the detriment of an emancipatory educational policy that would enable the formation of a critical, reflective, politicized, and collective novum homo socialis. We use Social History, according to the contributions of Hobsbawm and José d’Assunção Barros, as a theoretical and methodological foundation to critically analyze official documents — laws, decrees, deliberations, among others — guided by the evidentiary paradigm (Ginzburg) and by history against the grain (Benjamin), seeking to identify evidence, regularities, and silences in the texts examined, and understanding documents as monuments and products of power relations, not neutral in relation to their sociopolitical and socioeconomic contexts, from Foucault’s perspective. The results indicate that the official documents analyzed tend to conceive Financial Education primarily as an instrument for regulating individual behaviors related to consumption, saving, credit, and investment. In our documentary analyses, we observed a recurring attempt to adapt individuals to market demands, with limited openness to approaches that promote the critical problematization of broader economic and social structures.