Based on Michel Foucault’s reflections on the liberal art of governance as a general framework for biopolitics and neoliberalism as a mode of guiding individuals, this study proposes a genealogy of neoliberalism in Brazilian education to explore the hypothesis that neoliberal rationality was established in Brazilian educational thought as early as the 1970s, contrasting with the dominant view in educational policy that it only emerged in the 1990s. To this end, the study focuses on the academic-theoretical relationships between the anarcho-capitalist economist Theodore William Schultz and the Brazilian scholar Carlos Geraldo Langoni, whose contributions introduced neoliberalism into the Brazilian educational debate by expanding the concept of capital to encompass educational training as an investment for economic development.