Banca de DEFESA: ADNNA RAQUEL ARAUJO DE SOUZA

EDUCATION IN TIMES OF COUNTER-REFORM: 

Fiscal Adjustment and its implications for Brazilian Public Higher Education 

(2015-2022)

Dependent Capitalism. Counter-reformation of the Brazilian State. Tax Adjustment. 

College education. Federal Higher Education Institutions.

This dissertation aims to analyze the repercussions of the Fiscal Adjustment policy on Federal Higher Education Institutions (2015-2022) within the context of dependent and financialized capitalism. It is a study guided by the critical-dialectical method, which relied on bibliographic and documentary research, as well as the analysis of budgetary data available on the SIGABRASIL platform. Departing from the historical development of monopolistic capitalism and capitalist formation in the particularity of Brazil (dependent and peripheral), we sought to understand the counter-reform unfolding in the Brazilian state since the 1990s and continuing to the present day, as well as the Fiscal Adjustment policy, the main mechanism for appropriating public resources. In this scenario, marked by "reforms" and the dispute over the Public Fund, social expenditures are the first to suffer restrictions, which directly impacts social policies, dismantling previously acquired rights, promoting the cancellation of programs and projects in various areas, precariousness of labor relations, and complicating expressions of the Social Question. In this research, we seek to identify how this movement impacted Higher Education, considering the historical particularities of both our object and our temporal framework – which was mainly marked by the deepening of fiscal austerity policy through Constitutional Amendment No. 95 of 2016, as well as the expansion of conservative and privatist projects in Education. The study pointed out that during the Temer and Bolsonaro administrations, there was an intensification of the process of dismantling public Education, so that the implications of the movement incorporating the Fiscal Adjustment Policy were not limited to the financial scope. It was possible to observe that, during the analyzed period, public Education suffered not only budgetary reductions but also ideological attacks, strongly aligned with the autocratic project of bourgeois domination. In Higher Education, beyond the intensification of privatization, interventions, and resource atrophy, we also perceive the use of budgetary limitation as a coercive and punitive measure for Federal Higher Education Institutions, aiming, among other things, to garner support for ongoing counter-reforms. We conclude, in this sense, that the interventions carried out by the Temer and Bolsonaro governments engender the market-oriented scope typical of a subservient-mercantile conception, which not only subjects public Education policy to market dictates but also imposes neoliberal logic on all instances of life.