Educação, Estado e Religião: Subsídios para compreensão do ensino religioso nas escolas públicas no paradigma do Estado laico

Abstract

Religious Education in public schools has been the subject of dispute for many decades, a debate that was asserted after the enactment of the 1988 Constitution, with the express provision for discipline, in article 210, § 1. The Law of Guidelines and Bases of National Education (LDB) prevailed, in 1996 (later amended in 1997), the Brazil-Santa Sé Agreement, in 2009, the decision of the Federal Supreme Court (STF), on the confessional modality, in 2017, and the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC) in the same year. None of the documents, however, was able to pacify the issue. It is in this sense that this work was developed. In addition to the introduction and conclusions, this work, of a qualitative nature, was divided into three parts: the first analyzing the scope of the secular State, the second religious teaching and the third dedicated to making the necessary criticisms of the current panorama of religious teaching in public schools, making it possible to respond to the proposed research problem: is religious teaching possible in public schools in the paradigm of the secular state? The answer was fundamentally based on two moments: the first, in which it is concluded that religious education in the confessional modality is unconstitutional, as it is largely contrary to religious freedom, and the second, in which it is seen that even the non-confessional modality, in despite the formal constitutionality, it is not compatible with the limits projected by the secular State.