Militarization in national public basic education policy and school management: the National Civic-Military Schools Program (2019-2023)
Educational policy; Militarization; Reproduction; Basic education; School management.
This thesis under construction has chosen as its object of investigation the processes of militarization in the national public basic education policy and in the school management of the National Civic-Military Schools Program (PECIM), implemented by partnership between the Ministry of Education (MEC) and the Ministry of Defense (MD) during the years 2019 and 2023. The question is: how and why did Jair Bolsonaro's federal government carry out a concomitant process of militarization in national public basic education policy and school management through PECIM? As the main objective of the research, it was decided to analyze the process of militarization in the national public basic education policy and in school management through PECIM, considering the repressive-disciplinary dimension of education and the dimension of democratic management, between the years 2019 and 2023. Based on this general objective, the following specific objectives were proposed: a) to highlight the functions and characteristics of the capitalist state in social reproduction, with a focus on the relationship between repression and Basic Education; b) to examine the socio-political context of Jair Bolsonaro's militarized government, his government project and his ministerial composition, with an emphasis on the interfaces with basic Education; c) to understand the elements that make up the basic education project underlying the management of the Ministry of Education during Jair Bolsonaro's administration; d) to analyze the process of building, implementing and revoking the PECIM in the Ministry of Education, in conjunction with the Ministry of Defense; e) to analyze the changes in school management brought about by the main legislation, regulations and official PECIM documents. To this end, historical and dialectical materialism was used as the philosophical basis on which to build theoretical premises that understand the capitalist mode of production through contradictory relations of production and reproduction, in which the capitalist state has a fundamental position, whether in its function of repression, through the Armed Forces, police and legal power, or in its function of consent and subjection, through the modern educational system, significantly. In order to scientifically grasp the processes of militarization induced by the PECIM, research has used theoretical and empirical categories as fundamental analytical tools. The current research has built up a state of knowledge, based on national academic production on the contemporary phenomenon of the militarization of education. In addition, it began a historical-documentary research centered on a corpus made up of 36 documents of various formats, mainly from the MEC between 2019 and 2023. So far, the research argues that, in Brazil, since the 2010s, there have been concrete expressions of the repressive-disciplinary dimension of education and educational proposals from neoconservative political alliances that influenced militarization in educational policy and school management during the MEC's administration between 2019 and 2022. It also highlights that this process of militarization is part of a basic education project, underlying the actions and speeches of Jair Bolsonaro's federal government, of a reproductive nature and linked to an authoritarian and repressive perspective