YOUTH AS A CONTESTED CATEGORY: Historical Representations, Youth Protagonism, and the BNCC

Abstract

This article analyzes historical representations of youth and the appropriation of the concept of youth protagonism by the BNCC for Brazilian New High School. It starts from the hypothesis that, when linked to Life Project, competencies, autonomy, choice, curricular flexibility, and the world of work, youth protagonism ceases to be primarily associated with critical and collective participation and begins to operate within the field of individual self-management. Through bibliographical and documentary analysis, the text examines authors, curriculum documents, and studies on Brazilian youth, showing that youth has historically been represented either as a threat or problem to be governed, or as a promise of renewal and a force for social transformation. It argues that, in the BNCC, protagonism is recontextualized by a neoliberal rationality, becoming a form of individual responsabilization, adaptability, and self-entrepreneurship. Data on work, income, schooling, and youth inequalities make problematic any conception of Life Project detached from concrete conditions of existence. As a critical counterpoint, Paulo Freire allows autonomy to be understood as a historical, ethical, and collective process, rather than as the self-management of precarity. The article concludes that youth protagonism, although it may point toward democratic formation, tends, in the BNCC, to operate as a pedagogy of responsabilization, requiring young people to individually manage structural contradictions they did not produce. The question remains: what kind of protagonism, for which youth, and in the name of what project of society?