By MARCIA APARECIDA JACOMINI & ANA PAULA CORTI*
The devaluation of historical, geographical, philosophical and sociological knowledge is cementing a public school that is dull, dissatisfied and diminished.
1.
On January 27, 2025, researchers and entities published a study entitled “Reduction of Human Sciences in the Curriculum of the São Paulo State Network” pointing out that the São Paulo government cut classes in the subjects of history, geography, sociology and philosophy.
The attack on the humanities is only comparable to what happened during the civil-military dictatorship of 1964, a period in which the subject of Social Studies was created in the 1st grade, erasing the specificity of history and geography. In the 2nd grade, the subjects of sociology and philosophy were excluded and replaced by Moral and Civic Education and the Social and Political Organization of Brazil (OSPB).
Recent curricular reforms, contradicting the importance given by the Law of Guidelines and Bases of National Education (LDB, Law No. 9394/1996) (Brazil, 1996) to the area of humanities as essential content for the formation of human beings in the context of contemporary societies, have orchestrated a true attack on the teaching of these disciplines.
The reform of secondary education through Law No. 13.415/2017 was implemented under the claim of modernizing the curriculum by providing students with choices that would provide better opportunities for social and professional integration. However, what actually occurred was a hollowing out of the curriculum in relation to school knowledge, expanding the presence of the so-called formative itineraries.
This reform produced extravagant proposals: the São Paulo state school system created 276 curricular components organized into 11 general training itineraries and another 25 vocational training courses (Jacomini et al., 2024). Across Brazil, bizarre subjects were created such as “What’s Going On Over There?” and “Gourmet Brigadeiro”, among others that caused outrage as they took away from a generation of high school students the opportunity to access scientific/humanistic/artistic knowledge that is so relevant for critical and civic education.
Disillusionment with the false promise that the new high school system would bring redemption from an uninspiring school experience culminated in a series of protests calling for the repeal of the reform, which came to light with the election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2022.
From then on, a certain consensus was built on the need to “reform the reform”. However, there was no agreement on what changes should be made. The camp that brought together entities and organizations historically linked to the defense of public schools proposed profound changes, unlike the agents defending the reform linked to the interests of capital, notably business institutes and foundations and their government branches. The federal government announced a public consultation in 2023 and as a result sent a Bill to the National Congress, approved in November 2024.
Law No. 14.945/2024 represented the correlation of forces in dispute, accommodating demands from both camps without fully meeting either of them. The reconstitution of a curricular matrix with a minimum of 2.400 hours (instead of the previous maximum of 1.800 hours) allocated to the subjects of the National Common Curricular Base brought some relief and hope to those who criticized the emptying of a set of historically constructed and systematized knowledge.
2.
In the case of São Paulo, expectations were quickly dashed. The São Paulo State Department of Education (Seduc-SP), which had already significantly cut the number of hours in the humanities with Law 13.415/2017 (from 720 hours in 2019 to 480 hours in 2023), announced another cut for 2025. Thus, in 2025, students in part-time daytime high schools will have only 466,7 hours of humanities in their curriculum. The subjects most affected were philosophy and sociology, but there were also cuts in geography.
Thus, the humanities area did not have a recomposition of the number of classes with the resumption of 2400 hours for the common core disciplines, on the contrary, there was a deepening of the attack on the disciplines that comprise it.
The study indicated that in the comparison between the pre-reform, 2024 and current (2025) curricular matrix, there was a decrease in the number of classes in the different teaching modalities and type of school, with those who lost the most classes in the area of human sciences being students in Youth and Adult Education (EJA), who now have less than half the classes they had before the reform, a decrease of 57,1% in training hours. For part-time and full-time high school students with a 7-hour daily workday, the reduction was 35,1%. Night school had a reduction of 23,8% and for full-time education with 9 hours daily the reduction was 22,2%.
These changes represent a conscious and deliberate option to establish a curriculum that is averse to knowledge from the humanities. It is no coincidence that the most affected disciplines were Sociology and Philosophy, which had a 62,9% reduction in their workload (REPU et al. 2025).
While the implementation of Law No. 14.9845/2024 is being discussed in the country, the state of São Paulo is also adopting curricular changes in the final years of elementary school in an unprecedented measure that reduced history and geography classes by 28,3% (REPU et al. 2025).
Meanwhile, the subject of Financial Education was introduced into the Basic General Education and must be attended by all high school students. In the educational itineraries, subjects such as Leadership, Entrepreneurship, and Life Project bring to public schools a simulacrum of corporate environments, but without trained teachers to teach them, and who are increasingly discouraged by having to waste their initial training teaching superficial subjects that are undervalued by students.
The digitalization of teaching materials, increasingly under the control of Seduc-SP, and the platformization adopted during Renato Feder's administration complete the picture of despair that plagues the São Paulo state network, very different from what was painted at the time of the reform, which promised a lively, vibrant and attractive school.
The devaluation of historical, geographical, philosophical and sociological knowledge cements a dull, dissatisfied and diminished public school, which instead of presenting new knowledge, of various colors and tones, that can expand students' thinking and their imaginative capacity, makes them narrow down to fit into the restricted space of an economistic, individualistic and immediate rationality, modulated in an increasingly premature way to the new forms of work, exploitation and neoliberal sociability.
*Marcia Aparecida Jacomini is a professor at the Department of Education at Unifesp.
*Ana Paula Corti She holds a PhD in Education from USP and is a professor at the Federal Institute of São Paulo (IFSP).
References
BRAZIL. Law No. 9.394, of December 20, 1996. Establishes the guidelines and bases of national education. Available here.
BRAZIL. Law No. 13.415 of February 16, 2017. Amends Laws No. 9.394 of December 20, 1996, which establishes the guidelines and bases for national education, and 11.494 of June 20, 2007, which regulates the Fund for the Maintenance and Development of Basic Education and the Appreciation of Professionals in Education, the Consolidation of Labor Laws - C LT, approved by Decree-Law No. 5.452 of May 1, 1943, and Decree-Law No. 236 of February 28, 1967; repeals Law No. 11.161 of August 5, 2005; and institutes the Policy to Promote the Implementation of Full-Time Secondary Schools. Available here
BRAZIL. Law No. 14.945 of July 31, 2024. Amends Law No. 9.394 of December 20, 1996 (Law of Guidelines and Bases for National Education), in order to define guidelines for Secondary Education, and Laws No. 14.818 of January 16, 2024, 12.711 of August 29, 2012, 11.096 of January 13, 2005, and 14.640 of July 31, 2023. Available here.
JACOMINI, Márcia Aparecida; MOUTINHO Jr., Isaac Oliveira; ANDRADE, Weverson Marques de; SOUZA, Ozani Martiniano de; LAVADO, Janaína Paulieli. The reverse side of the reform of secondary education in the state of São Paulo. Analytical Archives of Educational Policies, v. 32, no. 22, 2024. doi.org/10.14507/epaa.32.8270
PUBLIC SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY NETWORK [REPU] et al. Reduction of Human Sciences in the curriculum of the São Paulo state network [Technical Note]. São Paulo: REPU / Gepud, January 28, 2025. Available at: www.repu.com.br/notas-tecnicas; www.gepud.com.br
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