SOCIOEMOTIONAL SKILLS ON TRIAL: AN ESSAY ON THE PSEUDOSCIENCE OF COACHING IN EDUCATION

Abstract

In the midst of the structural crisis of capital and the advance of neoliberalism over educational policies, the defense of the development of socio-emotional competencies has consolidated itself as one of the main bets and strategies of the dominant class as a contemporary educational agenda. Within this context of neoliberal advance over education, the present essay aims to analyze the theoretical foundations and ideological assumptions of socioemotional education, investigating the reasons that allow characterizing it as pseudoscience and as a manifestation of educational coaching discourse within the school. The relevance of this study lies in the need to unveil the fragile and ideological foundations of an educational proposal that presents itself as scientific, but that operates in conceptual emptiness and in the reproduction of capital's interests. For this essay, the method to be used is based on the assumptions of Historical-Dialectical Materialism, Historical-Critical Pedagogy and Historical-Cultural Psychology, using immanent critique to demonstrate the contradictions between socioemotional discourse and the real needs of omnilateral human formation. The analysis is sustained by the contributions of Karl Marx (concept of ideology), Dermeval Saviani (Historical-Critical Pedagogy and school specificity), Newton Duarte (critique of pragmatism in education) and Lev Vigotski (Historical-Cultural Psychology). In addition to contemporary authors such as João Carlos Dias Furtado and Heloísa Alves de Sousa. This is a theoretical essay based on bibliographic research of critical-dialectical character, with documentary analysis of the National Curriculum Common Base (BNCC) and programs of socioemotional education. It is intended to demonstrate that socioemotional education, by disregarding the material determinations of human development and by focusing on subjective competencies disconnected from the appropriation of objective knowledge, constitutes itself as an instrument of adaptation of subjects to the current social order.