Mathematics education and the formation of the homo oeconomicus

Abstract

Financial education is included in the global educational agenda, especially through the dissemination of propositional documents from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and is inscribed in the National Common Curriculum Base (BNCC) in conjunction with the contents of mathematics taught at school. In addition, there is an interest in the field of research in mathematics education, which starts to take financial education as an important problem to be investigated in the teaching and learning processes. In this article, we aim to analyze historically situated mathematical practices that, in their connections, form the homo oeconomicus, understood as that subject required for the proper functioning of the economy, in the light of Michel Foucault. For this, we analyzed mathematics textbooks from other historical moments, collected at the Museu da Escola Catarinense, of elementary school, from the collection A conquista da matemática, and theses and dissertations that deal with the theme of financial education. The theoretical-methodological procedures are inspired by genealogy, a concept used by Michel Foucault. From this, we infer that an updated economic function remains in mathematics education: from the technical contents, ways of calculating and thinking economically from commercial and industrial work until the first half of the 20th century, behaviors and values of how to consume, build budgets, and save under neoliberalism also began to be exercized.