Attack on the Cantinho do Bom Pastor Educational Center in Blumenau
At a time when the government was taking a break from implementing the New Secondary School, society was shaken by yet another massacre in an educational environment. The attack, which killed four children at a daycare center in Blumenau, Santa Catarina, occurred shortly after another extremist act that resulted in the death of a 72-year-old teacher in São Paulo.
Crime that didn’t happen in Brazil…
This was a case that seemed fictitious to Brazilians. We only followed through films, documentaries and the distant international news. We did not imagine that this type of extremist attack would become so common to the point that the press, which had never bothered to create a protocol for covering this type of event, would improvise a form of treatment for these cases with the investigation in full swing in Blumenau. .
tragedy announced
We cannot forget that signs have been given for some time and we didn’t want to see them. School violence against teachers and among students has been progressively increasing. The disrespect of parents and government authorities towards teachers is another sign of a weakened school environment. The demonization of internationally recognized education icons, such as Paulo Freire or Anísio Teixeira, is another point of corrosion. Not to mention the professional devaluation, with the deterioration of wages and working conditions.
All this, when placed in the same pot, results in a pressure that inevitably becomes an explosion.
New High School Review
There is not the slightest doubt that the new High School needs to be rediscussed. It is almost a consensus among educators. However, the current government cannot fall into the political temptation of undoing everything just because it was instituted in the past administration. There are many good points, as well as several that deserve to be reassessed.
The proposed model does not work with alignments between schools, especially between public and private ones. Insisting on the proposed model, we would actually register a setback, by increasing even more the inequality of conditions among students. This reform that was being implemented tends to deepen these differences.
And the implementation of the new model followed another colossal abyss that opened up, caused by the isolation due to Covid-19 in which private institutions kept their content transmitted in the online model. Meanwhile, many public ones do not even have computers and the internet. The same scenario is repeated among its teachers and students.
School Violence
Secondary schools, mostly belonging to state networks, which usually pay less than municipal and federal schools to teaching professionals, obliges many to submit to double regency in order to survive. Other than that, they still live with the fear of escalating school violence.
The reform imposes profound changes on teachers and pedagogues in their work routines, alteration of their workloads and changes in the contents worked on, without them having been effectively heard, having participated in the construction of the new educational “framework” or at least requalified to adopt the new format.
Educational Framework
They set up this new matrix on top of a “world of make-believe” in which they put all the teaching in the same basket, when we know that the differences and conditions are striking. If the changes promise promising educational itineraries for the children of the upper classes, on the other hand, there are few options for effective curricula for poor students. In other words, the New Secondary School can be good, but only for students from top private schools, who gain fuel to further increase the distance of inequality from public networks. This difference goes back to the work “Casa Grande e Senzala” published by Gilberto Freyre, in 1933. The line of social immobility is well defined when these young people compete for space in the labor market.
Another aggravating factor of this inequality is that, due to the new order, several generalist disciplines are replaced by others aimed at the professional choice made by the student, still very young, to assume this responsibility for his future. While private school students can count on psychologists, vocational and educational counselors to help them find their itinerary, the same does not happen to the majority who study in public institutions. And yet, if there is a lack of teachers for the basic subjects, how can we find them for the new maids?
The designed reform tends to deepen educational inequalities. On the other hand, the opinion that secondary education needs to be modified is almost unanimous.
Fake News
As a characteristic of current times, counterinformation ends up disrupting communication processes, with some of these Fake News repeated by authorities and even reproduced by the press.
The New Middle School was not revoked. At no time has the current government threatened to tear up the reform! Cautious, they define it as a suspension to promote adjustments, giving an initial period of two months for rediscussion.
It’s better for the government to do this tidying brake now than to continue accelerating in an arbitrary error. You can’t politicize the fight between right and left. The formation of the adult of tomorrow depends on the reassessment that is taking place now.
However, we know that issues to be democratically decided need to be approached with care. The fear is that these two months of reassessment will not be enough to pass the project clean.
Meanwhile, students in training are in a hurry, which ends up affecting and causing an unknown factor regarding the elaboration of the National High School Examination. Although the Mec tries to reassure by stating that it will maintain the next base, it fails to reassure those involved. Students depend on this test to enter universities. In turn, higher education institutions are increasingly dependent on ENEM as a way of selecting and enrolling students, with repercussions on their financial survival, especially private institutions.