
José Luis DERISSO and Newton DUARTE
RPGE – Revista on line de Política e Gestão Educacional, Araraquara, v. 30, n. 00, e026004, 2026. e-ISSN: 1519-9029
DOI: 10.22633/rpge.v30i00.20979 9
neopragmatism, Glasersfeld’s radical constructivism, the social constructionism of Berger and
Luckmann, and also Thomas Kuhn with his theory of scientific paradigms, the epistemological
relativism of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Edgar Morin’s theory of complexity, among many
others. In the case of complexity theory, it is based “on physicist Werner Heisenberg’s
uncertainty principle to criticize the linear and fragmentary view of modern science and to
defend the thesis of the indeterminability of scientific truth” (Derisso, 2010, p. 52).
The death of metanarratives means, for postmodernism, the death
of History with a capital H, of reason, of science, of philosophy, of art, insofar as everything is
art and nothing is art, of politics, which has been replaced by daily resistance to diffuse and
decentralized powers, and finally the death of the subject, at least of what postmodernists
consider to be the modern subject or subject of modernity. (Duarte, 2004, p. 219)
According to Derisso (2010), this “revision in the conception of science coined by
modernity” practically rules out “the possibility of interfering with human and social reality in
order to consciously transform it, that is, to bring about a revolution,” admitting only the
possibility of “small interferences or minor adjustments” (p. 52). In other words, postmodern
thinking instrumentalizes the fight against theoretical propositions that underpin political,
social, and ideological struggles against the exploitation and oppression of the majority of the
population by capitalism, positioning itself, in this sense, in the field of counterrevolution.
Driven by the widespread dissemination of neoliberal and postmodern ideas in various
countries, the “pedagogies of learning to learn” (Duarte, 2001) gained strength in Brazil from
the second half of the 1980s onwards, including constructivism, project pedagogy, reflective
teacher theory, and competency pedagogy. For the present study, we are interested in the link
between these “new” pedagogies and the motto “learning to learn,” which historically
originated in the New School movement and was ideologically attuned, at the end of the 20th
century, to neoliberal and postmodern ideas (Duarte, 2001, 2004).
In this context, the pedagogy of competencies, of which Swiss sociologist Philippe
Perrenoud is one of the main proponents, comes to the fore. Expressing concern about a certain
haste in implementing projects aligned with his conception, Perrenoud made it clear that
competencies refer fundamentally to behaviors of adaptation to specific practical contexts:
The description of competencies should stem from the analysis of situations and actions, and
knowledge should be derived from this. There is a tendency to move too quickly in all countries
that embark on the development of programs without taking the time to observe social practices