A ideologia do Escola Sem Partido à luz do marxismo: concepção autoritária de educação em sintonia com o neofascismo/bolsonarismo

Abstract

The central objective of this doctoral thesis was to critically analyze Escola Sem Partido (ESP) as a movement and program. The thesis aimed to determine if ESP is a project of (de)ideologization of teaching activity that promotes ideological neutrality or a conservative ideological offensive against education that favors the rise of Bolsonarism. ESP emerged as a movement in 2004 but gained political and social strength after 2014, when its proposals began to gain support. This occurred after Rio de Janeiro state representative Flavio Bolsonaro asked Miguel Nagib, the movement's creator and a lawyer, to draft a bill summarizing ESP's ideas. Nagib then filed Bill No. 2,974/2014 in the Rio de Janeiro Chamber of Deputies. His brother, councilman Carlos Bolsonaro, filed a second bill, No. 867/2014, on the ESP in the city council. In 2014, federal deputy Erivelton Santana (PSC/BA) introduced Bill No. 7,180, which proposed amending Article 3 of the Guidelines and Bases of National Education Law by adding a new provision that prioritizes family values over school education in matters of morality, sexuality, and religion. Several other bills from the ESP were appended to this bill, adding the possibility of penalties, such as two to four years' imprisonment, for teachers and public servants in a school environment. This transformed it into a substitute bill in 2024. The bill received a favorable opinion from the rapporteur and was processed by the Social Security, Social Assistance, Childhood, Adolescence, and Family committee on October 21, 2025. The bill was the focus of an investigation. We found that the ESP's growth and strengthening coincided with the period of open political crisis and the impeachment of former President Dilma Rousseff. It reached its peak after implementation in the MEC during the Jair Bolsonaro administration. Based on Marxian and Meszarian analyses of ideology, our thesis is that the ESP defends and propagates a reactionary (neo-fascist) bourgeois ideology that aims to impose a conservative, uncritical conception of education. This conception serves to reproduce the sociability of capital and focuses on criminalizing teachers. Thus, the ESP constitutes an important ideological movement of the far-right Bolsonaro regime. This theoretical, documentary, and bibliographic research is based on a Marxist theoretical framework. Our methodology follows the synthesis of multiple determinations allowed by historical-dialectical materialism. Our timeframe was from 2014 to 2025. We used bibliographic and documentary research to collect data from bills, judicial opinions, and social networks. The main theoretical contributions deal with ideologies (Marx, 2004, 2005, 2008, 2011, 2013; Marx and Engels, 2007; Mészáros, 2004, 2016, 2011, 2009, 2008; Lukács, 2013; Gramsci, 2007; Eagleton, 1997; Löwy, 2015; Iasi, 2014; Konder, 2020), neofascism/Bolsonarism and education (Löwy, 2016, 2019; Mattos, 2020; Leher, 2020, 2023), and Escola Sem Partido (Frigotto, 2017, 2018; Miguel, 2016; and Penna, 2016 and 2018).