Entrepreneurship since childhood: ways to govern life?

Abstract

This paper submitted to the Praxis Education Journal deals with the Project of Life, self-management and the culture of entrepreneurship. Our general objective is to analyze how the Project of Life – as a transversal curricular component – is associated with the culture of entrepreneurship. According to this culture, the Project of Life promises to develop the individuals in multiple dimensions, motivating them to solve problems and make decisions to achieve goals and accomplish professional fulfillment. When associated to the Project of Life, such culture imposes business devices – like competitiveness, performance and productivity – to the educational scope, submitting the training processes to a new governmentality. From that, we raise the following question: What have we made of ourselves under the control forms of life? We believe that the academic debate on the Project of Life is grounded in principles from the neoliberal market, prioritizing the formation of economically productive individuals, whose are, however, politically submissive and docile. Thus, we intend to discuss the role played by entrepreneurial pedagogical rationality in directing the forms of self-government. To develop our criticism, we adopt an analytical standpoint from Foucault's thoughts, which emerges as a theoretical framework capable of presenting the limits of neoliberal devices that place Education in the guidelines of productivity and effectiveness.