Changes for continuity: the mark of pedagogical duality in different projects for secondary education in Brazil

Abstract

In Brazil, since the “First Republic”, education has undergone reforms that affect all its levels, including high school. At the core of these reforms, this level of education is traditionally marked by educational dualism, reproducing the power structures present in Brazilian society. The latest of these reforms, instituted in 2018, assigned high schools the function of subsidizing young people in the construction of their future life projects. The 2018 reform is understood in this text as an attempt to adapt the education of Brazilian youth in line with the status quo. “Youth Studies” has emerged as an interface field between various areas that have, in one way or another, the “School” and its processes as a point of debate. This debate draws on official documents in the field of basic education in Brazil to discuss the Full-Time Education Program (Programa Ensino Integral – PEI), instituted by the São Paulo State Department of Education in 2012, which, in a pioneering manner in the country, centralized the curricula of junior high school and high school in the construction of what was called “life projects” for students, creating specific schools for this purpose. With the experiences developed so far, according to those sources and related literature, it is possible to assert the continuity of educational dualism in high school, which, above all, does not provide a full and disinterested education for most young people who seek, in public school, references for a better life, often hindered by the place they occupy and from where the future can be projected.