Educação para a cidadania no Brasil: imperativo constitucional ou direito sonegado? Da exegese do art. 205 da constituição a uma proposta de reorientação da legislação e política educacional brasileira à luz da experiência portuguesa

Abstract

This study, which analyzes the Brazilian educational legislation and its advances and setbacks made by the country in terms of creating the Constitutional Right to Education for Citizenship a reality, questions the disparity between the directive extracted from article 205 of the Federal Constitution and the content of the actual educational guidelines, defending the need for a review of our curricular matrices, in order to bring them closer to the purposes for which they were conceived - and to harmonize their content with the principles of the Democratic Rule of Law. In a process that involved a comprehensive review of preliminary studies and a careful analysis of data extracted from Brazilian and Portuguese educational institutions and educational platforms, the investigative stage consisted of a combination of bibliographical, documentary and empirical research techniques, whose findings, purified through the use of the deductive method, provided the elements that, together with the theoretical repertoire guiding work, would lay the foundations for the defense of our proposal to reorient curricular regulations and design a National Citizenship Education Program. This proposal, matured in the aftermath of our previous studies, was guided by the reflections of Maria Vitoria Benevides, Aída Monteiro, Ninna Ranieri, Marcos Maliska... In addition to a diverse repertoire of authors including names such as Paulo Freire, John Dewey, Vidal Moreira, Jorge Miranda, José Murilo de Carvalho, Hannah Arent, Anísio Teixeira, Istiván Mezzáros, Michael Apple... Among other theoretical references whose ideas are based on the need for recognition to review and improve teaching models that are no longer capable of dialoguing with the values of the Democratic State. In this manner, based on the diagnosis that points to Brazil's backwardness in offering an education capable of enabling the individual in training to exercise their citizenship autonomously and consciously, it looks at the progress being made by other countries, especially with the knowledge of the Portuguese Republic, which, in the wake of its “National Strategy for Citizenship Education”, has been pursuing, since 2017, an agenda whose main objective is to guarantee the presence of the program in the country's schools and its components that favor the appropriation of “citizenship knowledge” by its citizens. Thus, understanding that the presuppositions of “Education” in Brazil need to be aligned with democratic values, the maintenance of the traditional curriculum, in addition to not favoring this alignment, represents an obstacle to students' access to knowledge that is fundamental to the full exercise of their citizenship; the appropriation of this knowledge inevitably passes through the school, and noting that the educational regulations established in the country ultimately provide the main guidelines for what will or will not be prioritized in the educational process (defining, in general terms, what will or will not be taught to the student, a prospective citizen), this study, in the aftermath of the best exegesis of the constitutional text, challenges the Cientific Community to recognize the political role of the school, and calls on it to promote a broad review of the actual regulations in order to link them to an emancipatory project that supports and strengthens the foundations of our Democratic State of Law.