Dilma defended secondary education reform in the 2014 campaign – 04/04/2023 – Panel

The reform of secondary education was one of the campaign promises of former president Dilma Rousseff (PT) in 2014, at the time, a candidate for re-election.

Pressured by growing criticism from educators and students, the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) government decided to suspend the implementation of the new secondary education while the MEC (Ministry of Education) concludes a public consultation on the matter.

In an advertising piece aired that year, Dilma defends the reformulation of the bars. “It’s crystal clear that we need to do a major overhaul of secondary education, starting with the curriculum,” he says. She criticizes the excessive number of subjects, 12, and in interviews she even declared that, in this way, teaching was not attractive for young people.

For the former Minister of Education under the Michel Temer administration, Mendonça Filho (União-PE), responsible for implementing the new model, the suspension at this time is a sign of a “pain in the neck” of the PT administration.

“There is naturally a very big headache because the PT promised in 2014 the reform of secondary education, but the one who had the competence to do it was the Temer government. We had the courage to take the debate forward and we managed to approve it in Congress”, he criticizes.

He recognizes difficulties in implementing the proposal, especially after the government of Jair Bolsonaro (PL), but points out that the transition period would only end in 2024, enough time to correct distortions.

“We faced a pandemic for two years that corroded and heavily damaged Brazilian basic education; the average level was reached. We had a period of four years in which inaction and lack of path, direction, were the tonic in the portfolio and evidently that now the debate is resurfacing”, he points out.

Mendonça also maintains that a good part of the difficulties of the new secondary education, in fact, were only brought over from the old model and are not exclusive to Brazil. “It has difficulty in structure, there is unevenness [entre os estados] but I ask: is this difficulty not present in the old high school? They want to attribute the structural defects of teaching to the new format, “she maintains.

The repeal of the model, in his assessment, would be “a flag of the ideological left and engaged in Brazilian education”, and would put Brazil in a situation of backwardness in relation to other nations. He cites as an example that today, in Brazil, about 10% of students manage to take a technical course concomitantly with high school, while in Europe the percentage exceeds 50%.

“We are not reinventing the wheel, we are not pulling reform out of the hat. On the contrary, we are at least 50 years behind schedule. The PT wants to end secondary education to put what in its place? Nothing? To return to a social tragedy?”

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