A educação a distância no Brasil: o público e o privado na formação de professores (2014-2024)

Abstract

The reconfiguration of teacher education in Brazil during the term of the National Education Plan (PNE 2014-2024) is analyzed. It is investigated how distance education (EaD) became the central vector of the expansion and commodification of higher education, and the reactions and strategies of the federal universities in the face of private hegemony in the provision of licenciatura programs are problematized. The scope is restricted to licenciatura programs — undergraduate teacher-education degrees — marked by the collapse of on- campus enrollments and by the massive migration of the teacher-training axis to distance education; in these programs, the educational conglomerates that oligopolized the sector and commodified teaching under the logic of financialization and the asset-light model are identified. The territorialization of higher education is examined: the interiorization of teacher education occurred through market channels, with the explosive growth of private distance- education on-site support centers. As for the federal universities, their strategies and absences are analyzed: stagnation in on-campus provision, low adherence to and dependence on the UAB System, and a strategy that preserved academic symbolic capital at the cost of lost relevance and the territorial retreat of the public sector. Methodologically, the treatment of millions of records from the INEP Higher Education Census microdata (2014-2024) is taken as the point of departure, with a Data Warehouse and ETL procedures, in order to analyze trajectories of enrollments, admissions and graduates across the on-campus and distance modalities, in both the public and private sectors. Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of field, habitus and capital are mobilized, along with Stephen Ball's performativity and policy cycle, Raymundo Faoro's patrimonialism, and the critical studies on the commodification and financialization of education of Valdemar Sguissardi, Marilena Chauí, Lucídio Bianchetti and Jaime Giolo. It is concluded that this reconfiguration produced a territorial asymmetry and a formative bifurcation in Brazilian teacher education, and that the risk of an "educational apartheid" marked by curricular shortening and precarization is consolidated, as the for-profit private sector becomes the main gateway into teacher education.