President Jair Bolsonaro is taking his anti-leftist ideological war to Brazil’s classrooms and universities, causing angst among teachers and education officials who say the government wants to fight an enemy that doesn’t exist.
Bolsonaro and top officials have announced plans to revise textbooks to excise references to feminism, homosexuality and violence against women, say the military will take over some public schools and frequently bash Paulo Freire, one of Brazil’s most famous educators, whose ideas had worldwide influence.
“One of the goals to get Brazil out of the worst positions in international education rankings is to combat the Marxist rubbish that has spread in educational institutions,” Bolsonaro tweeted on the eve of his inauguration.
For the government, the ideological battle begins with the removal of Freire’s legacy in schools, which Bolsonaro and other conservatives say turns students into “political militants.”
On the campaign trail, Bolsonaro said he wanted to “enter the Education Ministry with a flamethrower to remove Paulo Freire.”
Bolsonaro and his education minster appear to be looking for inspiration in philosophers like Olavo de Carvalho, a Brazilian who lives in the U.S. and is known for his anti-globalism and anti-socialist views.
While Freire believed in the state’s mission to educate the Brazilian people, including poor rural farmers and the illiterate, de Carvalho advocates reducing the state’s role in education, favoring private or religious schools.
“The government does not have to educate anyone; it is the society that has to educate itself,” de Carvalho said last year during a talk about education on his YouTube channel. He added that proposals “based on the idea that the federal government is the great educator I am going to fight to the death.”
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After Bolsonaro took office Jan. 1, the Education Ministry dismantled its diversity department and published a new set of guidelines for textbook publishers that eliminated references to topics such as violence against women and sexism.
Receiving an outpouring of criticism, officials backtracked on the revised texts, saying the new guidelines had been written by the previous administration and published by mistake. Even so, Education Minister Ricardo Velez Rodriguez vowed in his inaugural speech to end the “aggressive promotion of the gender ideology.”
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Bolsonaro has said he would review the content of Brazil’s national high school exam to rid it of any questions on gender or LGBT movements. He made the announcement in a YouTube video after seeing a question from last year’s exam on a “secret dialect used by gays and transvestites,” called Pajuba.
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