MEC/SEB notice 3/2025: attack on university autonomy and pragmatism in teaching degrees

Abstract

This work results from a theoretical study on MEC/SEB Notice No. 3/2025, which aims to select proposals from Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) for offering teaching degree vacancies within the Institutional Program for the Promotion and Induction of Innovation in Initial and Continuing Teacher Education with an Emphasis on Integral Education (Prilei). It seeks to denounce the offensive led by the Department of Basic Education (SEB) of the Ministry of Education (MEC) against the constitutional principle of the universities’ didactic-scientific autonomy, intending to subject teaching degrees to fragmented and reductionist pedagogical logics. The analysis was conducted based on the categories of historical-dialectical materialism — totality, mediation, contradiction, and praxis — revealing how the teacher training proposal in the notice promotes the precarization of teaching degrees in Brazilian public universities. Far from representing progress in initial and continuing teacher education with an emphasis on integral education, the initiative will subordinate the pedagogical projects of courses in Federal Higher Education Institutions (Ifes) to the technocratic frameworks of the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC) and the National Curriculum Guidelines (DCNs), while conditioning the allocation of budgetary resources on the alignment of courses with these frameworks. The results expose the farce of a policy that, under the discourse of innovation and equity, attacks university autonomy, deepens capitalist logic in public education, exacerbates historical inequalities — especially in the Amazon region — and empties the critical and formative nature of teaching.