Escola sem partido: o cerceamento da liberdade de ensinar em ataque à educação para a democracia

Abstract

Schools Without a Party is a civil society movement whose agenda is to combat what its supporters call “ideological indoctrination” and “gender ideology”, which, according to them, are being promoted in schools and universities in Brazil. The movement has gained prominence in public debate in the last decade and, since then, bills aimed at imposing censorship on the academic freedom of teachers, based on the guidelines of the Schools Without a Party, have started to be proposed in legislative houses across the country. Some of those projects became laws that later had their constitutionality questioned by the Supreme Court, which has considered them materially unconstitutional for violating the academic freedom of teachers and the freedom of speech in school and university environments. However, many censorship bills are still being discussed at the federal, state and municipal levels. Given this situation, this thesis aims to discuss whether the educational proposal of the Schools Without a Party movement, based on the restriction of the academic freedom teachers and the control of teaching activity, would constitute a threat to the right to education as regards the Brazilian Constitution of 1988, which sees that as a right to education for democracy. This thesis discusses how the Constitution addresses the right to education and seeks to clarify how the academic freedom of teachers constitutes an assurance for education for democracy, highlighting it as an autonomous fundamental right. Furthermore, this thesis draws on Freire's critical pedagogy as a starting point for understanding the educational process aimed at democratic formation, as well as a guide for analyzing the educational concept defended by Schools Without a Party movement. In order to understand the movement, clarifying its ideological bases, an analysis of the Brazilian sociopolitical context in which it arises is carried out, in which a mitigation of democracy is verified. This thesis also analyzes the bills for censoring the academic freedom of teachers being discussed in the National Congress and the decisions issued by the Supreme Court on this topic. This thesis concludes that the educational proposal defended by Schools Without a Party movement, based on curtailing the academic freedom of teachers, threatens the education for democracy advocated in the Brazilian Constitution of 1988, not only because of its unconstitutionality, but also because it is based on a neoconservative and anti-democratic ideology, representing values opposed to those established by the constitutional text.