Reducing education to pure technique is to anesthetize curiosity (Freire, 1997). Neo-liberal policies privilege private interests and promote a model of education based on competition and consumerism (Harvey, 2005). This model of education perpetuates and increases inequalities. It also affects education whose priority is not to deliver learners…

This paper examines contemporary challenges for education and democracy in Brazil. In the past decade, conservative forces headed by the Escola sem Partido (ESP) movement have led a scaremongering campaign against teachers and public education, with Paulo Freire's critical educational philosophies as their main enemy. This study investigates the…

Background/Context: Considered one of the most influential educators in Brazil's history, Anísio Teixeira is one of the renowned Latin American students who came to Teachers College (TC). Teixeira was a prominent reformer and educator known for advocating free, public, and secular education accessible to all children. His work as an educator and…

Following months of debate in 2012, Brazilian President Rousseff signed the Quota Law establishing quotas for the percentages of Black, Brown, and indigenous public secondary school students that public universities must enroll. Guided by a social dominance theory framework, this paper examines the extent to which such a policy can challenge an…

This paper aims to identify elements that will help with the process of thinking through curriculum issues based on the concept of open architecture. We argue that this concept can be an interesting driver of practice and debate concerning curriculum development in different contexts. More generally, we seek for viable public education that is…

In this paper, we sought to analyze if the internet and social networks usage could be impacting the constitution of an assertive political culture among young people in South Brazil. We hypothesize that although these new socialized agents are widespread among the young, apathy and disinterest in politics remain. To test our hypothesis, we…

This paper is a discussion on the possibilities of educational democracy in Brazilian Graduate Education, with a focus on the current Graduate Education Field regulations and the recent affirmative actions and public policies of access. We analyzed laws, decrees, government plans and selections edicts, through categories derived from historical…

Though schools do not track in Brazil, I find that racial classroom segregation in Brazil is on par with recent estimates from North Carolina high schools (Clotfelter et al., 2020). How does racial classroom segregation occur without tracking, and in a supposed "racial paradise," no less? Using national, student-level data spanning from…

Purpose: This paper aims to provide an overview of an expanded, workable conception of rural youth and adult education that will move Brazil closer to a fair, egalitarian society focused on human development. Design/methodology/approach: This research uses a qualitative bibliographic perspective, analyzing historical data extracted from…

This paper discusses how the construction of citizenship and citizen identities takes place among young students in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Considering that education is responsible for fostering the sense of citizenship, this research asked 209 students from a public high school to write letters to a future Brazilian president and to answer an…

This paper seeks to identify strategies for anti-racist higher education, drawing on scholarship that locates structural racism in global and local centre-periphery relations. We first examine how the centre-periphery divide has been identified and challenged in anti-racist intellectual and political movements, focusing on exchanges and solidarity…

The aim of the study is to examine how multiculturalism and peace studies have been viewed in Brazilian and North American literature as gleaned both from Brazilian research studies and articles presented at Peace Education Special Interest Group (SIG) in American Education Research Association (AERA), within the scope of 2010-2014, which…

This paper reflects on racial identification in Brazil, considering how concepts of race travel internationally and are transformed locally. In light of the silencing of issues of race in Brazilian public education, we analyse the experiences of student teachers of colour participating in a professional development project coordinated by the…

The hegemonic ideology of racial democracy and rural cultural norms of racial silence continue to inform racial identities and national racial discourse in Brazil, in this case within the Landless Rural Workers' Movement (MST), a left-wing movement for agrarian reform. In this article I engage in textual analysis of a textbook from the MST's youth…

A fundamental question lies at the heart of the issues surrounding the connections between educational projects and larger socially critical movements and projects. What would a socially just education system look like? In answering this, one place immediately comes to mind, a locale where this question was answered through real transformations:…