By ANTONIO SIMPLICIO DE ALMEIDA NETO*
What is this BNCC, if not a precarious curricular proposal aimed at the precarious training of the precarious proletariat?
Dear Antonio,
I am writing from here, on the other side of the mirror. I confess that I never imagined that I would do something like this, an unusual act, to say the least, but I heard from some colleagues from the past that you became a historian, a history teacher and, as if that were not enough, you are training new teachers of this subject at Unifesp. Who would have thought? I would like to see this scene.
I won't deny that I feel a little proud, but it would be reckless to say that I had any influence on your choices. If I'm not mistaken, it's been almost 50 years since our last meeting... You were a small, beardless boy, entering adolescence without much desire, you were in the 7th grade, I think. I was already a respectable gentleman, a veteran, an austere teacher, wearing a white cotton lab coat, thick, dark-rimmed glasses, advanced baldness and hair styled with Glostora hairspray.
You may be surprised to learn that I am dead. A massive heart attack. It happened in 1987. I was at home, watching television, relaxed in my armchair, alone, in my pajamas. My body was found by the doorman of the building where I lived, there in the old center of São Paulo, two days after the fateful event. I didn't go down to get the daily newspaper, he called the intercom, knocked on the door, silence, used the spare key that I had given him for emergencies. Elias was a cool guy. He came to my funeral.
However, I am not writing to talk about this tragic and inevitable episode, because we all die one day, right? In fact, I decided to write because I learned (here in this timeless non-space, we know many things…) that you found a documentary source, an excerpt from an interview I gave to a history undergraduate student at FEUSP, in the subject History Teaching Practice, with that professor… Elza Nadai (who is among us), and who did an internship with me in 1979, when I was already retiring.
It seems that the student wrote in her report: “In a conversation with the teacher [me!] I could observe a complete disillusionment regarding teaching. He has been teaching since the 40s, and firmly believes that being a teacher is an innate virtue, not something that can be learned through techniques. He told me that he has used several teaching methods and currently uses the one that the class deserves, that is, expository classes, because [they, the students] are not qualified for anything else.” Let’s face it, Antonio, the student’s report is full of typical representations of someone who has never taught. This talk of “disillusionment regarding teaching”, my God, Zeus!
I want to see you enter a classroom full of insolent teenagers, several classes and shifts, salary cuts, advancing age, a heavy routine, parents who are wasting their patience, authoritarian management... It would be more appropriate to talk about disenchantment with teaching and school. In any case, my answer was truly incredible! Me and my sarcasm!... The people here were perplexed and some called me an enlightened despot (here, despite the immateriality, we still maintain good humor).
I remember well when I talked to that young history student, arrogant as she is, insinuating that I didn't know how to teach, wanting to expose myself in front of the students. Ah, the impetuous youth! By the way, she also died, in a motorcycle accident on the Rio-Santos highway, on the way to Trindade. If she were alive, I bet she would be a voter for the excrement (I love that neologism!) ex-president Jair Bolsonaro.
By the way, I also heard that in one of your classes, you mentioned my catechetical methodology as an example not to be followed: dictating questions and answers to be memorized for the test. Between you and me, after so many years, I admit that my classes were not very dynamic. Without wanting to justify myself, the fact is that I was not a historian, with a college degree in history and everything else, and I didn't even have a degree. In fact, I studied law, but I was never very good at being a lawyer, and since I really liked history, I ended up becoming a teacher as a side job, and I stayed.
This was very common back then, in the 1940s and 1950s. So I did whatever I felt like doing. Do you remember a class I gave to your class about the Phoenicians? I found that subject fascinating, but you couldn’t stand it. I dictated a question/answer and mentioned “trireme vessel,” and I drew on the board a rather crude outline of a boat and three levels of oars, so that you would understand what that expression meant. That was the most I could do with teaching. As for Professor Neide, who you had classes with in the 5th grade, who was much younger (I heard she died of Covid-19…), she started teaching in the 1970s, studied history, a degree, everything was nice, she was adored by the students, even her voice was modulated for that age group.
And there’s more…, only here, in the afterlife, did I understand that in those 1970s, public schools were undergoing a true metamorphosis. The children of the working class (to use the expression of old Marx, whose revolutionary fame I discovered here) began to attend school. They were people with different customs, little cultured, and uneducated parents. And that was very complicated for teachers like me, who were used to teaching the children of the middle class, “people like us”, you know? And then those “different people” began to arrive, as the people of Higienópolis say. Students without teaching materials, without uniforms, who didn’t do their homework, were disorganized, some came because of the school lunch (!), and had very uncivilized manners. I may seem prejudiced, but… they were horrible!
In all truth, and for the sake of my late reputation, my understanding corresponded to a certain zeitgeist, as they say. It was the spirit of the times, so many teachers and educational authorities shared my perception. I vividly remember Keila, the music teacher who, in addition to not teaching music, was extremely prejudiced against any style other than classical; Constantino, the Portuguese teacher, who humiliated students who did not hand in impeccable work (like that of his son, who was his classmate); Juvêncio, the physical education teacher, who subjected physically inept students to a Polish corridor formed by able-bodied students (fascist!, they would say today); Salim, the science teacher, who used alcohol on the table and other objects in the classroom, and would not even touch the chalk, for fear of getting contaminated (he was disgusted by the students). Looking from a distance, there was even a picturesque fauna.
You know, Antonio, I must admit that it was very difficult for that veteran professor who considered himself part of the intellectual elite, because he had read a few too many books, and who assumed that he was teaching the children of his social class, his equals, having to civilize the ignorant masses, teach the children of the “dangerous classes”, and still be placed in a salary and work condition… proletarian. Resentment – the key that deciphers Brazil – hit hard. I know that you do not have a complacent view of the past, things of academic training, but that intern caught me at a bad time.
Changing the subject, I am… (I was going to say “worried”, but the fact is that nothing else worries me) astonished, so to speak, because I learned that you are struggling with a new curricular proposal, a monster called BNCC, which removed the subject of history from the curriculum and that, on top of that, there was a historian who collaborated in the elaboration of this document, shooting himself in the foot! And, as if that were not enough, there are historians discussing “the BNCC of history that we want”! Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas! What small advantages do to human beings, don't they? But what leaves me perplexed, my dear, is not vanity, because I have also committed my sins, but knowing that some of you, who claim to have historical awareness, have gotten into this leaky boat.
I notice, from the little I follow from a distance, that the mentors of this curricular document are cunning and more sophisticated than the military. et caterva of yesteryear. They really caught you... It was a perfect curriculum crime! As if they used a huge dragnet and captured all basic education (including high school), school subjects, their contents and teaching materials, higher education (private and public), training and qualification courses, and even these electronic gadgets, which didn't exist in my time, like platforms and software (I don't even know what that is...). These people from private foundations don't sleep on the job! As they used to say, while you went with the corn, they came back with the cornmeal.
Now, what is surprising is that teachers from your generation, and some from the previous generation, who fought so hard to democratize education and educate critical students, have jumped on this sinking ship, which has not only eliminated the History subject in high school and is depreciating the training of future History teachers, but is also depriving students in basic education – the children of the working class! – of having access to qualified knowledge of History. Not to mention the creation of these… curricular xenomorphs, such as Entrepreneurship and Life Project, which hark back to the EMC and OSPB of yesteryear. So, did all that lead to this?!! So many debates about resistance, gaps and folds, inclusion, awareness, anti-racism, decoloniality, seminars, conferences and publications, to result in a… window of opportunity$ and business$?!
How curious, my dear, I don't know if you remember, but in another documentary source that you used in your research, there was an excerpt from the minutes of a pedagogical meeting from 1970, from a state school in Vila Brasilândia, on the outskirts of São Paulo, in which the director told the teachers that they should educate the students “according to the level of the neighborhood, [and whose objective] will not be [would be] intellectualization, but rather directed towards work.”
This sentence sounds disturbing, doesn't it? I didn't teach at that school, but at the time I would have considered it normal, because that was the game being played. Now that I'm in another dimension and see everything from another perspective, it seems to me that that director was a... visionary! Yes, a visionary! 50 years later his prediction has come true! What is this BNCC, if not a precarious curricular proposal aimed at the precarious education of the precarious proletariat?
Not even Paulo Freire (I also saw him circulating around here) expected this… And do you know what impressed me the most? It’s that this curricular coup happened in broad daylight, was planned slowly and widely announced, and still had the effusive help of academic sectors, under the claim that they were doing their best or “resisting from within”. The more I pray, the more I get haunted!!
For these and other reasons, I have no desire to return, reincarnate, descend, embody, descend, these things... Besides being somewhat disenchanted since the 1970s... if only I believed in life after death... I could nurture some hope of full fulfillment on another level of existence. But there's no way around it, Antonio, you'll have to deal with the "horizon of expectations" of your present time, as that guy Koselleck wrote (hey, what a complex guy! He's also dead). Believe me, the pineapple and cucumber that you grew and harvested will have to be peeled by you and by future generations.
And with that I will say goodbye, with this mention of the hard work that awaits future History teachers. Or were you under the illusion that there would be eternal life? Don't be fooled, my dear, "everything right now can be for a second", as the very lively Gilberto Gil sang. When you least expect it..., baw!, we go from this to... nothing.
Well…, I think we won’t talk to each other anymore, nor will we see each other, so I wish you strength in the years of life that remain to you. You must have already realized that “the road is deserted” (that’s from Braguinha, a cool guy!) and the big bad wolf is lurking, sometimes, stealthily, participating in an academic event.
Goodbye!
Professor Helio Vieira[1]
*Antonio Simplicio de Almeida Neto is a professor in the History Department of the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP). Author of, among other books, Utopian representations in history teaching (Ed. Unifesp) [https://amzn.to/4bYIdly]
Note
[1] This text was previously published in the e-book History Teaching Letters, organized by ALMEIDA NETO, Antonio Simplício de; SOARES, Olavo Pereira; MELLO, Paulo Eduardo Dias de.
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