Students learn to quote leftists to triumph in the Enem essay

Students are being instructed to write essays citing authors and adopting left-wing perspectives to obtain high grades in the Enem (National High School Exam). The trend raises controversies about the exam’s lack of objectivity and students’ freedom of thought.

Guidance, in many cases, does not come from the ideological preferences of writing teachers, but from the intention to improve students’ results and the observation that certain worldviews tend to be more pleasing to test correctors. The allusion to certain authors is seen as a shortcut to a good grade.

One of the strategies suggested by teachers is to adopt what has been called a “wild card repertoire”: authors and quotes that are valid for practically any situation and that give good results with the test correctors. Among the most mentioned repertoire suggestions are radical left ideologues such as the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984), the French intellectual Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) and the Brazilian philosopher Djamila Ribeiro.

Foucault, who in 1977 signed a letter calling for the legalization of sex between children and adults, is one of the authors most recommended as a “wildcard repertoire” for Enem. (Image: Reproduction)

The latter, in fact, became a frequent figure among the wildcard repertoire recommendations, especially because of her book “Pequeno Manual Antirracista” (2019). In comments from popular teachers on the networks about this year’s essay – whose theme was “Challenges for confronting the invisibility of care work carried out by women in Brazil” -, a quote from Djamila was treated practically as the right answer to meet the demand of Enem to present arguments “with sociocultural repertoire”.

On Monday (6), a writing teacher with almost 200 thousand followers on Instagram posted a photo of Djamila accompanied by the caption “the great woman who saved many people’s writing”. Some users expressed concern about not having mentioned the philosopher and asked which quote from her would fit with the theme of 2023. Others celebrated the fact of having used her as a reference.

“I usedeeeeei,” commented one Instagram user. “I started my introduction with her”, celebrated another. “I wanted to quote her [sic]but I forgot what the quote was like”, lamented one internet user, using a crying emoji. “THANK YOU DJAMILA RIBEIRO [sic]”, wrote, with heart emojis, another user.

The quote to Djamila that many students used was: “It is important to keep in mind that to think of solutions for a reality, we must take it out of invisibility.” The phrase appears in several educational contents for those who are going to take the Enem, and is often mentioned as a wildcard repertoire to address topics related to the concept of “invisibility”.

Other frequent figures in wildcard repertoire recommendations are the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017), the Brazilian journalist Gilberto Dimenstein (1956-2020) and the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954). The choice of these personalities is not random: they have all appeared in Enem grade 1000 essays from past exams.

Students and teachers who disagree with left-wing theses are forced to forge opinions

The requirement for writing that meets ideological standards makes life more difficult for students and teachers whose ideas do not fit these standards.

Writer and teacher Fábio Gonçalves, who gives virtual classes and has taught writing to high school students, states that he needs to “show students how the entrance exam works” and say that they will have more chances if they “left the text”.

“All preparation for the entrance exam requires students to adopt a leftist, progressive, communist worldview, whatever they want to call it”, he observes. “That is why it is very difficult for the student, in thirty lines and pressed for time, to defend a thesis that deviates from ideological common sense. It risks sounding incomprehensible to the correctors – they too, as expected, conditioned by the leftist manual.”

Even though, in theory, the student’s world views should not be decisive for the final grade, some Enem criteria tend to make the correction of texts more subjective. Among the five skills required in writing is, for example, presenting proposals to solve social problems while respecting human rights.

Gonçalves exemplifies how this can favor ideologization: last year, when the drafting proposal was “The challenges for valuing traditional communities and peoples in Brazil”, the easiest path was to adhere to the thesis of indigenous genocide by the “Europeans bad guys.” When presenting proposals to repair the damage caused, the demarcation of indigenous lands would be the easiest solution for the student.

The professor criticizes the very idea of ​​demanding solutions to such complex social problems in an entrance exam essay. “Just to find a reasonable solution to these issues would require years of studies, reflections, conversations, etc. In fact, who in the Brazilian Senate knows how to resolve these problems? I find the topics, especially Enem’s, abominable. It’s a pointless thing”, he comments.

For him, the current tendency in Brazilian education to demand argumentative texts from students is a subversion of education. “Normally students begin their writing studies with argumentative texts. Traditionally, however, this was the last stage. Before, the student learned to describe objects, people, animals and landscapes; then to narrate small episodes, to write letters, to formulate small dialogues. After exhaustive training in simpler textual genres, the student moved on to rhetorical writing”, he observes. “So a student who is unable to describe his own room or the breakfast table is expected to not only talk about the most pressing social problems but also find a way to solve them. Can you believe something like that?”

For students who do not adhere to the leftist manual, faced with the demands of the Enem essay, the solution has been to forge an opinion to please the brokers.

A high school student consulted by the People’s Gazette, who will not be identified, says that his teachers “tell him to write what he wants to read.” In this year’s Enem essay, he says he cited structural machismo as one of the reasons for the invisibility of the care work carried out by women, believing that this could help him obtain a higher grade. In the real world, he disagrees with the thesis.