Sequential courses: Assessment of the university teacher profession based on Theodor Wiesegrund Adorno’s theory in the texts “Taboos on the Profession of Teaching” and “Cultural Industry”

Abstract

The creation of the sequential courses is the most recent innovation in the reform of the Brazilian higher education. The university crises and reforms at the modern time were ruled by the accusations of perpetuating, in Higher Education institutions, outdated teachings based on the old medieval authorities (CHARLE; VERGER, 1996). These factors have led to the creation of international programs of evaluation. In the national plan, Brazil began its course on evaluation in the Programa de Avaliação das Universidades Brasileiras (PAIUB), implemented in 1993, and changed in 1996 into the Exame Nacional de Cursos (ENC – Provão) and in April, 2004, into the Sistema Nacional de Avaliação do Ensino Superior (Sinaes). These modifications increase the problems that involve such a controversial subject: the assessment. The purpose of this research is to apprehend the academical evaluation of teachers of sequential courses, based on the theories: “Cultural Industry” and “Taboos on the profession of teaching” in which Adorn deals with the humanity treatment as an immediate presupposition of the survival. First, 400 questionnaires were sent to students of the sequential courses of a university and 227 were answered. The study enabled us to verify that in the academical community the evaluation system provides what is called barbarism, which is present in the effective sale of courses and closing of others that do not reach good classification. The evaluation system involves taboos that need to be better understood as a form of barbarism. In order to get rid of barbarism, the university has to get free from the taboos the students have when, in the implied sense of the evaluation instruments, they are assigned to making the evaluation under the pressure which reproduces the barbarism.