LIVING CURRICULUM OR MONITORED CURRICULUM? THE BNCC BETWEEN THE RHETORIC OF CREATIVITY AND THE LOGIC OF STANDARDIZATION

Abstract

The Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC), ratified in 2017 and 2018, has established itself as the primary instrument of curricular ordering in Brazilian basic education, mobilizing throughout its text a markedly emancipatory vocabulary — student agency, creativity, autonomy, and life projects — that coexists, paradoxically, with a highly regulatory normative architecture, expressed in the compulsory codification of competencies and skills, in the alignment of large-scale assessments, and in the subordination of teacher education to the prescriptive logic of the Framework. This article investigates this constitutive discursive contradiction, arguing that it does not represent an accidental inconsistency, but rather a structurally necessary operation for the functioning of the BNCC as a device of curricular regulation and control. Through qualitative research of a documentary and bibliographic nature, the primary corpus is the BNCC text (2017/2018), analyzed through thematic-categorical Content Analysis (BARDIN, 2016), in dialogue with Brazilian critical academic production from the period 2018–2025. The theoretical framework articulates Basil Bernstein's theory of pedagogic discourse, Alice Casimiro Lopes's perspective on curriculum policy, and Michael W. Apple's critique of curriculum as a field of power. The findings demonstrate that the BNCC operates a process of discursive recontextualization through which emancipatory languages are captured and reinscribed in service of standardization and performativity, producing what is here termed a monitored curriculum with a humanist face — sufficiently flexible in discourse to generate pedagogical adherence, sufficiently rigid in structure to ensure control. It is concluded that the defense of curriculum as a genuine space of creation and movement presupposes the critical recognition of the discursive mechanisms that operate its capture.