Anup Jagan
Three disciples of the philosopher occupy important positions in the Ministry of Education of Bolsonaro. Ideas of the thinker of far should influence literacy policies to universities
Considered a kind of intellectual guru of the Brazilian right, the philosopher Olavo de Carvalho emplaced three disciples in strategic positions of the Ministry of Education under President Jair Bolsonaro. Besides the owner of the Briefcase, Ricardo Vélez, the followers Carlos Nadalim and Murilo Resende occupy, respectively, the Special Secretariat of Literacy and the direction of the evaluation of basic education of INEP (National Institute of Studies and Research Educational Anísio Teixeira). Treated by the mentor as “Olavistas”, Vélez, Nadalim and Resende come to power tuned with the ideas they learned mainly in the online courses offered by the right-wing philosopher, and by which have passed about 12,000 people.
The ideas of Carvalho — centered mainly at the end of the “Marxist ideological indoctrination” that says to exist in the country’s public education — must influence the policies of the next four years on the two points of Brazilian education: from Literacy to teaching whose impact should be on about 48.6 million students enrolled in elementary schools and about the little more than 8.3 million of higher education students (according to the last school census of 2017).
In the center of the discourse of Olavo de Carvalho, are critical to Paulo Freire (1921-1997), the Brazilian educator and philosopher most referenced in universities of the world, appointed patron of Brazilian education in 2012, laureate dozens of times with the title Doctor honoris causa causa outside of Brazil. The Pernambucano pedagogue, criticized by the Bolsonaro government, defended education as a political act, keeping students in constant contact with contemporary problems in the educational process. Although not the only theoretician in which the Brazilian professors are supported, Paulo Freire is one of the main targets of OLAF’s criticism and also of the followers who now occupy complex secretariats in the Federal government.
Distant from the academic spaces, Carvalho was built as an outsider philosopher. He has no university degree, but he is the author of 19 books and spreads his ideas through online courses and social networks, where he exposes strong positions that often cause controversy among educators. It defends, for example, that the government loses the role of educator. The Brazilian Constitution establishes that municipalities are responsible for the public offering of early childhood education and elementary education. States are responsible for high school. For the philosopher, it is necessary to deregulate education and summarize the role of the government as a picker, whereby it would only be responsible for approval tests based on the evaluation of three basic skills: reading, writing and making accounts. In this broader perspective, Olavo de Carvalho — who has done basic education in a school maintained by the Catholic Church — defends a system of private foundations that subsist these schools. “Why does it have to be all subsigated by the central government or even by state governments?”, questioned in a video published in August last year, titled How to Save Education in Brazil?.
In this video, Olavo de Carvalho comes to question the need for the Ministry of Education’s existence and calls it “magic” a proposal presented by Bolsonaro in the campaign, to expand military schools, which according to the president would have better quality in Teaching than traditional schools. “That’s silly. The essential error is the idea that the central government has to educate the nation. It is a common idea that Getúlio Vargas put in the head of the Brazilian, “he says.
The criticisms made to Bolsonaro’s proposal during the pre-election campaign did not prevent the president from having a wide-ranging power of influence in the educational policies of the next four years. From the United States — where he has lived since 2005, the philosopher has appointed three names for the MEC, including the head of the briefcase, Ricardo Vélez, who according to him, “the person who understands most of Brazilian political-social thought” in the world. In the inaugural discourse, the minister highlighted his relationship with Olavism and the “liberal and conservative inspiration” that should represent in educational policies.
Carlos Nadalim assumes the newly created literacy secretariat with the function of addressing the illiteracy problem at all levels of schooling — according to IBGE data from 2017, Brazil still had almost 12 million illiterate. Nadalim has already been presented by Olavo de Carvalho in videos as one of the few that actually educate in Brazil. Coordinator of a school in Londrina called the Magic Balloon, implanted the Phonic method of literacy — based on the relationship between syllables and sounds to only then read complete sentences — to just over a hundred students and presented results that gave him the Darcy Ribeiro Award from the House of Deputies. Maintains the blog how to educate your children, where it offers online courses. He wrote that his project is “just a footnote to the immense work” developed by Olavo de Carvalho. Now in the government, it has defended the idea of banning global methods of teaching to read and write (associated with constructivist theory and Paulo Freire) to promote the Phonic method. Currently, there is not a single method of literacy in Brazilian schools, although most of them use the Constructivist method.
At the other end of the teaching, is the economics professor Murilo Resende, 36 years old, new director of INEP. He is the new responsible for the basic education Assessment System (Saeb) and the National High School Examination (ENEM), the main gateway to the Brazilian federal universities. Like Nadalim, Resende assigns Olavo de Carvalho his “intellectual maturation” and offers online courses on economics and political philosophy from the conservative perspective. When he was announced to the office, he was criticized for the lack of experience in education. The president himself came out in his defense, by Twitter. “Murilo Resende, the new coordinator of Enem, is a PhD in economics from FGV and his studies make clear the prioritization of teaching ignoring the current promotion of ‘ lacration ‘, that is, focus on the measurement of academic training and not only how much it has been indoctrinated in classrooms of class, “he said. After he took office in the government, Resende deactivated the site where he offered his courses.
Olavo de Carvalho says that the left exercises the control of Brazilian education, in which it would impose Marxist ideas, especially due to the predominance of the ideas of Paulo Freire, which defends the power of greater assimilation of the student by the relationship of social problems rather than Value only the technique. Oak goes in the opposite. It criticizes, for example, the literacy methods “introduced by this same leftist class in the years 1970 and 1980, such as Socioconstructivism, which creates structural reading deficiencies that do not heal ever again.” It takes years insisting that 50% of our university graduates are functionally illiterate. According to the functional Alphabetism indicator (INAF) of the educative action, 4% of those who reach higher education are in fact considered functional illiterate, but only 34% reach the proficient level.
