Professional recognition and neoliberal rationality in medical education based on the 2025 National Curriculum Guidelines (DCN)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Introduction: This article investigates the role of the 2025 National Curriculum Guidelines for Medicine (DCN) in formalizing a professional recognition regime permeated by neoliberal rationality. Medical socialization is understood, based on George Herbert Mead’s notion of the “generalized other,” as the incorporation of community expectations that provide intelligibility to professional conduct. Objective: To analyze how the regulatory provisions of the 2025 DCN reorganize the discourse of recognition in medical education, problematizing performance imperatives and the ethical dimension of care. Method: A theoretical-analytical study based on a discursive document analysis of Resolution CNE/CES No. 3/2025. The corpus comprised the full text of the regulation, focusing on provisions regarding the graduate profile, competencies, curricular organization, student monitoring, and assessment, all examined through the theoretical frameworks of George Herbert Mead, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Result: The discourse of competencies, progressive development, and individual accountability brings undergraduate education closer to logics of auditability and self-management. Ethical-humanistic discourses, such as person-centered care and commitment to the Unified Health System, coexist with mechanisms of continuous assessment and correction, inscribing the educational trajectory within a logic of performance legibility. Conclusion: Medical identity constitutes a space of dispute between standardization and variation. The notion of becoming makes it possible to problematize the claim of full curricular codification and to argue that the relational dimension of care is not exhausted by performance criteria.