STUDENT IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION IN SECONDARY EDUCATION IN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

Abstract

This study analyzes the discourse underlying the proposed formation of student identity in 21st-century secondary education, with a focus on countries in the capitalist periphery, based on the educational agenda of international organizations. It is a qualitative investigation of a documental and bibliographic nature, whose corpus includes the World Declaration on Education for All (1990) and the Delors Report (1996). The research adopts a post-structuralist theoretical-methodological framework and the Policy Cycle approach, concentrating on the policy influence context, grounded in the contributions of Peters (2000), Ball (2005, 2010, 2011, 2014, 2018), Mainardes (2006), Lopes and Macedo (2011), Paraíso (2012), Hall (2006), Silva (2016), among others. The findings indicate that the proposed formation of student identity is structured around discourses of flexibility, employability, and self-entrepreneurship, mediated by processes of regulation and commodification, which produce performative, competitive, and self-managed subjects. Within this scenario, values such as tolerance and peaceful coexistence are measured and deployed to discipline subjectivity in alignment with neoliberal rationality.