Tarcísio in the pedagogy of stalling – 08/08/2023 – Elio Gaspari

After the announcement of a disastrous initiative to take the pedagogy of São Paulo’s public school system to digital platforms, the governor of São Paulo, Tarcísio de Freitas, seemed to have corrected course, announcing: “We are going to bind [o material] and deliver printed, bound. That is, if the student wants to study digitally, he will be able to, if he wants to study in printed content, he will also have that option”.

If Tarcísio had arrived at the Government of São Paulo after having made a name for himself planting cabbage, this statement would have been acceptable. He was a stellar student at the Military Institute of Engineering. Afterwards, he was a severe administrator in the cleaning of the National Department of Transport Infrastructure and a correct Minister of Infrastructure during the Bolsonaro government. With these credentials, he knows what he is talking about and, because he knows it, he has switched from truculence pedagogy to stalling.

A truck and a locomotive are means of transport, but you cannot put locomotives on roads or trucks on rails. The same happens with printed school material and books or handouts placed on electronic platforms.

Leaving aside the issue of costs and availability of equipment for printing the volumes, which is no small feat. The governor complains because “everything becomes controversial, but I think that things are sometimes poorly communicated by ourselves”.

Its Secretary of Education, Renato Feder, announced that it would dispense with printed books from the Ministry of Education, migrating to electronic platforms. The truculent nature of communication overlooked its own polemical essence: the migration from the printed book to the electronic one. There is a healthy polemic there, provided that, like all polemics, it harbors a debate.

The use of electronic equipment in schools is a window into the future, but Pindorama’s experience in this area has more to do with all-time malfeasance. There are the overpriced robotics kits that went to Alagoas city halls. There was also the billionaire purchase of laptops by the National Fund for the Development of Education, which was barred by the Comptroller General of the Union.

Secretary Feder said that this semester he will be able to distribute 20,000 cell phones seized by the Federal Revenue to students. How, did not explain. It is known that the secretary is a shareholder of a company that sold to the government of São Paulo, in the last administration, 97 thousand notebooks, in the amount of R$ 200 million.

Behind printed textbooks there is a billionaire market, and behind digital pedagogy there is another, more complex one. The Gutenberg Bible, printed in the 15th century, is in the museums and, apart from cleaning, requires no maintenance. Electronic platforms require ongoing and costly maintenance.

The idea that a student can opt for the printed book or its electronic version is pure nonsense. If the governor and his secretary want to modernize public education in São Paulo, they can do so without truculence or fuss.

It is enough that they move at the pace of the bureaucracy, avoiding the eagerness, which is often toxic, at the pace of entrepreneurs interested in closing deals.

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