This study discusses the functioning of the so-called critical and progressive pedagogical and didactic practices that guide the behavior of critical teachers and left-wing intellectuals in the area of education in Brazil in the last decades of the last century. The study appropriates Michel Foucault's investigations on ethics and modes of subjectivation, explores the forms of ethical work and the morality of pedagogical and teaching behavior inaugurated in Brazil by critical pedagogical currents in some approaches of the Brazilian pedagogical discourse, as in the thought of Paulo Freire and the one of Dermeval Saviani in the beginning of the 1980's, dividing the struggles in the intellectual pitch of Brazilian education at the time. Emphasis is given to a description of the critical pedagogical technology carried out by these pedagogical approaches in teacher education courses for elementary and higher education. It combines the construction of a pastoral and ascetic moral whose aim was to promote awareness and exercises centred in a hermeneutics of the ego, characterized, among other things, by deciphering the self.
DIDATICS; PEDAGOGY; TEACHER'S EDUCATION; ETHICS