Are We Moving Backward?

• In Event: Out-of-School and At-Risk Adolescents and Young Adults: Five National Perspectives

Abstract

This paper discusses how curricular reforms in Brazil (MEC, 2016, 2017) create inequality – even when they announce the right of education and learning for all. By weaving teachers' and students’ narratives on curricular resistance we argue that they are knowledge creators weaving nets from scientific, experiential and other knowledges in their curricular conversations in class (Oliveira & Süssekind, 2015; Süssekind, 2014), and also that this understanding of education is a confrontation to epistemicide (Santos, 2011, Paraskeva, 2016). Taking the assumption that the hegemony of scientific knowledge invisibilizes everyday life knowledges within curricula as plausible (Oliveira & Süssekind, 2015), it becomes easy to imagine how these epistemicides enormously increase while the school is populated by colonized identities. For Everyday Life scholars (Oliveira; 2012; Oliveira & Süssekind, 2015), the current question is: How to achieve social and cognitive justice?
The narratives about Brazil’s reforms lead us to reinforce that cognitive justice is a condition for social justice and equality as a theoretical premise (Santos, 2011; Paraskeva, 2016; Süssekind, 2014). If cognitive justice is based upon the recognition of diversity and the right to participation within the difference (Santos, 2011), we also infer that the Minimum Curriculum (MEC, 1967) during the military dictatorship (1964-1985), the Common Core (MEC, 2017) and High School System reforms (MEC, 2016) labor in the same direction of cognitive injustice far beyond their commitments with the capital, the patriarchate, and the colonialism. Under those two agendas we imply that the public education is less and less for the public (Pinar, 2008).
Understanding how Brazilian curricular policies in a neoliberal context have been provoking hard impacts on education mainly in terms of curriculum uniformization, reduction of enrollment rates and rise of dropout and retention rates, we defend that the reformism presented as a solution for education’s shortcomings is based on the global known economy of accountability that makes a linear causality ratio between a teacher’s planning and its outcome (Oliveira & Süssekind, 2015). Those policies are not just part of the curriculum epistemicide (Paraskeva, 2016) and neoliberal global tsunami (Süssekind, 2014) but are also deeply associated with recent political enactments.
After the coup of 2016 we have been experiencing a legal, political and mediatic siege (Souza, 2016) to the human, civil and labor rights that also targets public education. In-between two coups-d-état (1964/2016), Brazil learns the profits of building a system of public education directed towards equality, based on the right of difference and in the richness of diversity, especially under the Labor Party government (2003-2016). The consequences of colonization, slavery, and dictatorship (1964-1985) are hard to change at the speed that the consolidation of democracy needs.
As a result, our presentation is a libel against the epistemological injustice related to the phenomena of expulsion of black and poor populations of schools in Brazil. Also, it is almost a manifest against the dehumanization of teaching, turned into a precarious work by the national curriculum and standardized external tests (Pinar, 2008), in addition to the privatization of public education system.

Authors

• Inês Barbosa de Oliveira, University Estácio de Sá

• Maria Luiza Süssekind, federal university of rio de janeiro state unirio