This article discusses the relationship between education and economic development, considering Marx's Law of Value. From this perspective, it analyzes the education of new generations, inserting this process in the vast realm of production and reproduction of the labor force, in situations of absolute and relative surplus value. Changes in education are seen as attempts to inaugurate a new phase in this process, based on the reorganization of capitalism inaugurated in the 1980s. The article questions the linearity between education and economic development affirmed by the Theory of Human Capital, integrating to the analysis political aspects related to the struggles and refusal of students to learn what the school selects as relevant, as well as resistance of teachers to the forms of labor to which they are submit.
reproduction of the working class; mass scale education; use value and exchange value of education