Thursday, February 04, 2010

Homeschooling PEC in the Brazilian House of Representatives

Homeschooling PEC in the Brazilian House of Representatives

If approved, will Brazil have state homeschooling? 

By Julio Severo 
The Brazilian House of Representatives will examine PEC 444/09 (Proposal of Amendment to the Constitution 444/09), by Rep. Wilson Picler (PDT-PR), which authorizes homeschooling for students between the ages of 4 and 17. If approved in all the levels and committees, the same controls, oversight and bureaucracy of the public education will be imposed in the new educational modality. 
Right in the style of communist governments, the Lula administration quickly approved in the end of the last year his own PEC, which lowers the age of compulsory education to 4, that is, the Brazilian Constitution was modified by Lula to force parents to deliver their 4 year-old children to the school. There was no opposition and obstacle for the approval of Lula’s educational PEC. 
However, the homeschooling PEC faces severe challenges and dangers. The House committees that will examine it are dominated by socialists ready to approve educational dictatorship and equally ready to obstruct educational freedom. If they cannot obstruct, they are able to turn freedom into dictatorship. 
Different from the past Brazilian Constitutions, which allowed homeschooling, the current Constitution, elaborated by many socialists, has been interpreted by courts and by the Department of Education as giving the State the supreme power to force parents to send their children to school — the only institution considered as perfect, by the Department of Education and by statists, for the learning and socialization of children and adolescents. 
According to researches and media reports, the learning and socialization prevailing at the Brazilian public schools is Marxist education, drugs, violence and sex.  
Some parents try to protect their children of that state “learning and socialization” by choosing homeschooling, but they are persecuted by Children Protective Services and other government agencies, being accused by the crime of intellectual abandonment, involving prison and fines. 
According to Rep. Wilson Picler, it is necessary for the State “to regulate the right to homeschooling in such a way that parents or guardians may obtain from the competent authorities the authorization to homeschool and that their children and teens may be regularly examined by educational officials”. 
If the homeschooling PEC is approved with the same controls that there is today in the public education, the result will be: 
Educational deficiency. By the force of stupid bureaucracies, the public school system of Brazil is producing stupid students. What will happen if the same bureaucracy is imposed on homeschooling? 
The disfigurement of homeschooling. A homeschooling strictly controlled by state education authorities strongly engaged in the Marxist ideology will serve the government’s interests, guaranteeing its own freedom of action within families, but it will remove the parents’ freedom, and freedom is the essential element of democracy. 
However it may be, different from Lula’s educational PEC that was approved with a lot of easiness, the homeschooling PEC will be analyzed by the House Committee on Constitution, Justice and Citizenship, whose members are mostly socialists. If approved, it may suffer modifications in order to serve the government’s tastes. 
Picler is a member of PDT, the socialist party founded by Socialist International vice-president Leonel Brizola, the man that was saved by Jimmy Carter in the 1970s and created the infamous CIEPS of state education in Rio de Janeiro. The vast damages the ideology of Brizola caused in Rio were so large that even today Rio has not been able to recover.
The Picler PEC is receiving support from Cleber Nunes and Cláudio Oliver, a Protestant minister that became known in Curitiba for his pro-Lula engagement and militancy. 
To read more on the amendment in Portuguese, click here.
Portuguese version of this article: PEC da educação em casa na Câmara dos Deputados
With information from Agência Câmara 
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