CURRICULUM POLICIES FOR YOUTH AND ADULT EDUCATION IN POSTMODERNITY: BETWEEN EMANCIPATION AND THE MAINTENANCE OF SUBORDINATION

Abstract

Adult and Youth Education (EJA) has historically occupied a marginal position within the Brazilian educational system, being configured as a modality aimed at subjects excluded from regular schooling. In postmodernity, marked by the intensification of neoliberal policies, EJA undergoes reforms that, while announcing inclusion, promote flexibility and the streamlining of training, thereby undermining its emancipatory social role. This study is justified by the need to problematize how such policies affect the democratization of knowledge and the integral formation of the working class. In recent decades, the expansion of distance education, the juvenilization of the modality, and the dismantling of social rights have reinforced practices that sustain subordination and weaken the right to education. The research seeks to understand to what extent current curricular policies contribute to emancipation or, conversely, reproduce exclusion. The main objective is to critically analyze these policies, highlighting contradictions and possibilities, in order to identify pathways that strengthen their emancipatory function. The study draws on Freire (1996), who conceives education as a practice of freedom; Apple (2006), who denounces curriculum as an ideological space; Giroux (1997), who advocates critical pedagogy; Gramsci (2007), with the notion of cultural hegemony; and Saviani (2007), with historical-critical pedagogy. It also mobilizes Thompson (2011), Minayo (2001), and recent studies on EJA. With a qualitative and bibliographical approach, the research applied content analysis (Bardin, 2011) to four articles published between 2020 and 2024.