Bolsonarista post-hell educational policy

Image: Thgusstavo Santana.
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By LUIZ ROBERTO ALVES*

Thinking about Brazilian Education for the near future

It is possible that liberal governments commit serious errors in their educational policies, as Florestan Fernandes pointed out regarding privatism in the LDB 1960, as well as the educational expansion in the FHC government was timid and the MEC was mistaken in the last months of Dilma Roussef. Nothing, however, was as brutal for the formation of Brazilian youth as the death compulsion of the captain and his troops.

No politics, dismantling of institutions, persecution of supposed leftists (that is, those who actually understand education) and an infernal humor in dealing with the generation between 4 and 17 years old. Fortunately, thinking about this generation implies projecting values ​​for the university world, in which it will continue its formative journey. It is also worth noting the absurdity of the “High School Reform” of the Temer-Mendonça-Rossieli trio, the starting point for Bolsonarist hell.

It follows, therefore, that some principal assertions are indispensable.

1 – MEC's ​​human-functional and political organization and all institutions connected to it will reverse 100% of the way-of-doing of the captain's four ministers. There can be no stone left unturned and it will be necessary to seek lost intelligences and expelled by the current troop to recompose the MEC as a whole and especially its critical mass. The blows, the violence and the backwardness of an entire generation demand radicalism, grassroots action, without agreement or conciliation. With the end of MEC's ​​imitation (by the work of pseudo-ministers) the themes that interest the new generations and that re-establish citizenship also return to the debate: human genders, curriculum and school time, human diversity and prejudices, forms of racism and stereotypes, generational clashes, the meaning and reason for new technologies in education, ecology and the environment, freedom of study, research, expression and other necessary and desired themes.

2 – Brazil will have to recover Hannah Arendt's reflection and question (an emblem of many educators): educational crises are complex processes that involve families, society, cultural-educational institutions and governments. The complexity is ethical, moral, aesthetic and epistemological. For its part, the central question is whether the adult generations of this country love the new generations or produce stereotypes and prejudices around them to allow such a low level of learning and school organization. This despite beautiful experiences spread across the vast territory in the relationship between students, educators and other professionals in the educational community.

3 – A national education policy, substantiated by plans, programs and projects, should not disregard the re-reading of CONAEs documents, the contributions of CNE, INEP, CAPES in recent decades and the contributive presence of social and student movements, scientific- education and unions. Obviously, there won't be any confusion, as the authoritarians assume, since large consultation processes have already been successfully carried out and direct participation by sectors of society has built new institutional arrangements in large cities and states.

4 – Brazilian Education will have to lose references in the paraphernalia of the economy (the one sold in the media) and the technobureaucracy, as the first is no longer knowledge about the person and his place of life, but rather accounting at the service of currencies and profits; on the other hand, the second, necessary for planning education, must lose its false power to impose curricula, external tests and odd school constructions for the geographic and cultural diversity of Brazil. The so-called educational system, in the three instances of government, will have a specific commitment to the 1988 Constitution and its desideratum of collaboration, with the LDB (1996), with the ECA (1990), with laws, decrees and norms that really are driving curricula, learning processes and community organization, as well as with institutions and organizations mentioned in the previous statement. May the economy never again make education one object among others and the bureaucracy respect Max Weber a little more.

 

an ecological platform

Students embraced the world of cybercultural connections and brought it to school. They are connected, despite the new directions of liberal capitalism in its collusion with the so-called bigtechs (Google, Amazon, Facebook/Meta etc.), demanding profound criticism. The phenomenon of the connected society demands respect and research. On the other hand, millions of school and out-of-school students lack the minimum connections, made worse by the infernal government. Thoughts coming from the natural sciences and cultural sciences within institutions and organizations expect to be called and/or convoked for a major contribution on this point. At the same time, human life is clearly put in jeopardy by the responses of the planet that suffers from climate change. No thought and no praxis can move away from the incarnation of ecological platforms. In the educational field in favor of the new generations, some points must be clearly connected, such as:

1 – All levels and stages of education/teaching are called to question technocratic bureaucracies and their excessive pleasure in quantity, although external evidence is important as a contribution to policies and correction of the course of the educational system; continuous act, assert individual and collective rights of organization and participation with a view to building knowledge and exercising skills in achieving healthy and happy lives;

2 – The connected world and the perspectives of becoming citizens of the planet require the exercise of local-regional citizenship and the continuous recreation of school environments, internally and externally, challenging and fertile places to share knowledge. To this end, FUST, FUNDEB and all government agreements already made in the various instances need to be streamlined and qualified, in order to fully reach all Brazilian educational communities. In this way, the expanded and collective construction of knowledge, carried out on the school floor, expands citizenship in the workplace and life, which leads to broader connections and to highlighting our relationships with the larger world from our community interactions;

3 – The expansion of school life from education professionals, at any point of our millions of square meters, will mean community strength in the face of many ecological, social and cultural opportunities, but also many contemporary risks, especially the destruction of nature and the new human subjection to the brutal exploitation of data by the corporations that own the world information system. Only the new and growing group and community force will guarantee the enlightened insertion of the new generations in the local and in the world and will indicate the path of their expanded psychosocial interactions;

4 – The extended community will challenge and include the educational-cultural capacities of the neighborhood, municipality and region, but will be competent to make a good critique of what is proposed to the school/community: the use of educational technologies, the decent work of educators /educators, teaching and learning methodologies, school participation in local, regional and national life, school and environmental management models, necessary or unnecessary bureaucracy and the daily realization of the Common National Curricular Base and the Diversified Part of the Curricula ;

5 – Curricular practice with the natural sciences, cultural sciences, languages, arts and culture of biopsychic interactions will gain consistency in collective action, whose skills and abilities will be both consistent with the way of researching these curricular components, via as a rule collective, how they will deal with the great themes brought by this knowledge, always plural, connected, inter and transdisciplinary, transversal and even poly and plurivalent;

It follows that educational, social, economic and political, local and national acts should bear the mark of ecology on a planet in serious crisis. Hence, educating communities become the guarantee of a larger chain of transmission of values ​​at the service of environmental health, since the entire curriculum of studies and experiences can be expanded to new social interactions, in which collective awareness (and certainly individual) produce actions on a larger scale and greater reach in the mitigation of natural disasters already on the horizon and even in the experience of humanity.

 

Thinking education from the legacy of educators

To get out of hell and rebuild Brazilian education, we need to go to the 1930s. Since the manifesto of the pioneers of education, in that year, Brazilian education is called to be a community that educates, that strengthens itself, that makes adequate readings of the culture accumulated in the natural sciences and in the human and applied sciences, arts and languages ​​and manages them wisely, sensitively and rigorously, according to the human and time-spatial diversity that it knows and with which it develops strong connections. And since then, there has been emphasis on ensuring that the knowledge of the curricular culture dialogues (and not just collides) with the daily life of health, work, consumption, gender relations, the natural environment, transport, sanitation, immigration, technological processes and information highways, the new geography of the world, economic inequalities and other data and phenomena indispensable for the constitution of the integral curriculum of studies and experiences in society.

It is also evident in reading the Manifesto that it is unthinkable to articulate projects by erasing difficulties and differences. The document begins by criticizing reforms “without a global vision of the problems”, isolated as “the sparse and submissive schools”. Now, the partial readings that we know about Brazilian culture (read Brazilian education) were projections of groups of power that are solidary in their own similarities and incapable of approaching and understanding the other, the other, which is understood here, as a premise, subjects necessary to the self, construction of the we, difficult but possible. The school itself became another, receiving curricula, laws and orders as a mandatory thing.

Therefore, since 1932 we should have been doing the opposite, since the recognition of differences induces the communication process, which reduces distances and creates a repertoire of languages ​​that approximates meanings and allows for new and renewed communications. As an example for thinking about Brazil from the point of view of its industrialization and the emergence of culture and education, Mário de Andrade, three years after the Manifesto, directed the department of culture and recreation at the City of São Paulo – managed by Fábio Prado – and not left behind: he directed all the educational-cultural action to boys and girls, children of impoverished immigrants, to ordinary people interested in science and art, to new readers in the neighborhoods, to those who dreamed of listening to music and watching movies sitting in a theater ( including classical) and those who wanted to narrate games, games, stories and memories of life. What was done there in three years, during the somber period of the Estado Novo, perhaps never had a following. Culture, Education, Health, Nutrition, Recreation, Memory, Research, everything came together in that public service around the “different” in São Paulo that was already exploding and swelling, forging workers and pushing the poor to the flooded floodplains of its rivers.

Too bad we're starting to celebrate the modernist/modern time (1922-2022) in a government that mocks and mocks culture and education. But we will still have a lot to celebrate from 2023 onwards.

 

A school education whose curriculum includes and thinks about Brazil

Taking the history of education from 1932 onwards seriously, the curriculum will have to have the face of the community that studies, talks, researches, makes decisions, implements and evaluates the work done, as it can never be a disciplinary grid or a list of curricular components. Much less a rigid and self-explanatory BNCC.

In this new curriculum construction movement, the educational community will demonstrate and explain the real Brazil – in itself and in the world – and will seek to change it in favor of a phenomenon never well understood in Brazilian history: the absolute political priority of education for generations and, consequently, its full cultural and citizenship achievement.

Durmeval Trigueiro Mendes, in a collective work, Philosophy of Brazilian Education (1985), published on the way out of the military dictatorship that also violated him, highlights the decay of Pedagogy and the growth of Technocracy: “We witnessed the beginning of the technocratic era in education and the downfall of pedagogues, unable to embrace the society of their time with a sufficiently realistic and comprehensive intelligence. […] The alienation of most pedagogues is, predominantly, in the methods of action and, in others, in the thought itself. Education appears without philosophy, without politics, without economics, disconnected at the same time from its real objectives and values, as well as from its historical and sociocultural conditions” (p. 87).

It is worth mentioning that the educational community does not need to be exemplary, model or paradigmatic. It is, however, about correcting Brazil's educational-cultural history, which instilled in organizations and institutions (as it did in politics, economy and business) a few doses of colonialism, imperial structures of relationships, echoes of the big houses surrounded by senzalas and internal disputes of power and interests. It is fair to recognize that the Brazilian school has always been capable of building beautiful experiences, however insufficient to create lasting marks or a tradition of changes and advances. This has been one of the “destinies” of intelligence in Brazilian history, which demands reversal and abandonment: fleetingness in the exercise of creation.

The configuration of an educating community will gain meanings and values ​​in the interlocution of culture and reality, reading and research, authorship and creation. It is known that, as a reaction to the historical phenomena arising from the old conditions of the country and the great unresolved social problems, we sought and still seek to create models and paradigms that, immediately and exemplarily, overcome those adversities. But models and paradigms do not emerge socially except through the slow and, if possible, loving construction of syntagms, coherent discourses, union of enunciations and scientific and aesthetic statements, dedicated gestures of cognition and emotion. And all this for a long time, with perseverance. Therefore, it is likely that the result will be a new paradigm, or a model, knowing right away that they will not be eternal. Every attempt to immortalize them led to the worst meanings of the myth, which is buried in history and takes a lot of work to be destroyed, as it requires high and clear awareness of many people and organizations.

Educating or educational community is a project of indisputable value. In this sense, it creates associations with an urgent learning value for a society that is supposedly global and buffeted by tremendous adversities. It is about the common good. As a common good, the educational community, created and developed from each school, will be a ball of yarn that will unfold through memory, through human amalgamation, through research, through calls, through active search, through growing awareness of the citizenship condition in movement of local-regional autonomy. To remember Clarice Lispector, the community will create names, adjectives, syntax, statistics, science and art in the work built from the many school novels in the country. The unrolled skein will weave meanings and values, thus establishing community networks committed to the education of local and regional generations. Weaving communities implies weaving the world through shared knowledge of it and through the emotion of getting to know it, recognizing it and changing it.

On page 16 of the General National Curriculum Guidelines for Basic Education (Brasil, 2013) there is a fully inclusive, lively and active reading:

Understanding and carrying out education, understood as an individual human and collective right, implies considering its power to qualify for the exercise of other rights, that is, to enhance the human being as a full citizen, in such a way that he becomes able to live and coexist in a certain environment, in its planetary dimension. Education is, therefore, a process and practice that materialize in social relations that transcend school space and time, bearing in mind the different subjects that demand it. Education consists, therefore, in the process of socialization of the culture of life, in which knowledge, knowledge and values ​​are constructed, maintained and transformed.

The concept helps to understand the meaning of an educating community, which is a practice of culture of life and mediation to achieve the rights and achievements of the people that the school includes and with whom it connects in an indissoluble way. Based on this conception, the understanding that the Brazilian basic school curriculum should be sufficient in Common National Curriculum Base (BNCC)[I], as if it were a paradigm or model established by the country's authorities. Worse would be to make it myth or taboo, “immovable”. Now, a country-continent, among the most diversified on the planet, makes it essential to research and include the cultural richness of the locality and region Diversified Curriculum Part, which makes up next to that the Comprehensive Study Curriculum, the right of all students in the nation and the constitutional value based on the values ​​and meanings of Education in Brazilian society. This diversified part of the curriculum makes up, it is an intrinsic set of the curriculum; therefore, its absence makes the BNCC a skeleton. Law 9394, LDB 1996 does not admit Common Base without local-regional curricular diversity. Its Article 26 is clear:

The curricula of kindergarten, primary and secondary education must have a common national basis, to be complemented, in each education system and in each school establishment by a diversified part, required by the regional and local characteristics of society, culture, economy and students.

On the other hand, there is no point in moving forward with the highly precarious and anti-cultural Secondary Education Reform and it will be fair for movements and institutions to rethink the Temer-Mendonça-Rossieli law and for the nation's government to make a decision about its meaning in our system.

 

Florestan, social development and school sustainability

As is known, Florestan Fernandes systematically fought for school education and sought to see it as a factor of change and development. He also sought public understanding for all situations that devalued the school and everyone who works and studies there. In one of his works, still in 1966 (p. 81), when dealing with the “pedagogical reconstruction” he asserts that: “The school divorced from the environment, neutral in the face of social problems and the moral dilemmas of men, incapable of integrating itself into the pace of life of a 'changing civilization', can only act as a focus of socio-cultural conservatism. It cannot function as a factor of change and innovation, because it is itself organized to be a focus of social stability and retention of the past in the present”.

The people and institutions that fought for Brazilian education have already taken new steps within the dilemmas pointed out by Florestan, but we still haven't been given the right to know, from the community assumed as an educator, a pedagogy that doesn't even need to have a name that limit, but that organizes the community, the school, as a place of sociocultural advancement. If the school ceases to be a living culture of the present in the face of the future, it will cease to be a school.

Strictly speaking, the Brazilian basic school, which includes everything from babies to 17-year-olds, is not sustainable, adopting the UN guidelines for sustainability. Nor is it sustained in the terms desired by the 1932 Manifesto or by the new ecological demands. In this sense, most of the 190 schools spread across the nation's territory, despite being made up of many trained professionals aware of the individual and social value of education, become unsustainable as an institution because the technocracy that organized it in previous centuries and even in the Republic , did not guarantee the right to a better reading of the world in which it operates. The atomized school, with imposed curricula and regulations, far from the effective right to analyze and interpret the local, regional and national “world”, also distanced itself from the condition of citizenship space, place of rights and responsibilities.

The school desired by the educators who proposed the 1932 manifesto to Brazil, consequently came to see that most likely its dilemmas are not greater than its strengths, which will become clear when all knowledge, sciences and local wills come together to make the school an effective and perennial educational society. Therefore, from the Sars Cov 2 plague-pandemic, which problematizes and alters our look, our perceptions, our feelings and even the movement of our intelligence, it is urgent that a new school ecology be assumed: the school-place starts to include wills, possibilities and knowledge incorporated in the people of the neighborhood, the countryside and the city; continuous act, it will expand its spaces of freedom to think together, create leisure together, organize complete curricula – and not just the BNCC – together and carry out, together, other actions that are of the nature of education as a dimension of the cultures of the country and responsible for teaching, creating social communication, expanding inclusions, understanding, explaining and bringing to social practice the sciences, arts, values, products of everyday life, ideas for change, curriculum enrichment and guaranteeing the strengthening of the neighborhood and the city. By extension, the country you want.

In order to definitively change and overcome the still obscure and not fully visible picture, in this book – as already opened in the premise – relations between pedagogical project, curricular actions and organization of school management are proposed. The history of educational unsustainability is also based on the way of constituting a curriculum of studies and experiences, ways of distributing resources, denialism in investing in the training of education professionals and the old authoritarian traits of school management, which all good scholars have located in history. of Brazilian education, therefore before and now.

In this way, sustainability implies the creation and development of attitudes contrary to what is already known and practiced, which fortunately already find thousands of colleagues, teachers, supervisors and directors in searches and experiments, sometimes brilliant. It remains to expand such projects, as sustainability is a movement of groups and communities. And the number one value is the formation of an educational or educational community, because it contains old and new material, ethical, cognitive and emotional resources, without which there is no sustainability. The same movement serves to sustain the nation and the Earth, our common home. The amalgamation of the aforementioned resources suggests, continuously, the supply of needs through self-managed cooperation. The educational construction of the expanded school community, whose size and scope will be as diverse as the Brazilian nature and culture, through comprehensive work curricula, the heart of the community, will be able to fulfill the two essential acts of the global sustainability proposal: to guarantee full rights to cultural and natural resources and, at the same time, build a future in which new generations are also happy, protected, active and educated.

The Brazilian Education of the near future will face and fully respond to urban, rural, forest, riverside, indigenous, quilombola, special schooling for nomadic groups and will do so taking into account the needs and desires, the potentialities and limits, the reason and emotion of generations full of the right to be fully educated and thus qualify to lead the country as knowledgeable of the world. Since duties are intrinsic to social life and the constitution of the State, what has been lacking up to now must come in handy: rights, rights, rights.

We already know from Mestre, with a slight change, that: “Learning implies confronting the expressed word and the lived world”.

* Luiz Roberto Alves is a senior professor at the School of Communications and Arts at USP.

 

Note


[I] The Common National Curricular Base for early childhood and elementary education was approved in December 2017. In turn, that intended for secondary education was approved by the CNE in December 2018, worked under pressure and haste; therefore, in much less time than the previous creation.

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