Abstract
This chapter deals with the challenges of Catholic school education in Brazil, in a context of profound changes and strong ideological debates. It is a historical approach to what happened from the 1960s to the present. The formation of sufficiently prepared teachers, openness to inter-religious dialogue and inclusion are posed as some of the key challenges for the Catholic school in Brazil.
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Notes
- 1.
This was an innovative production in terms of catechesis. The so-called Catechetical Cards organized under the coordination of the specialist in the area, Brother Antonio Cechin (of the Marist Brothers’ Congregation). In one of his last interviews, Brother Antonio himself recalled how in 1969 the Minister of Education, brandishing these catechetical cards on television, shouted that they were highly subversive material destined to brainwash pre-adolescents for communism and pointed to Catholic schools as the main disseminators of these ideas.
- 2.
Entity hired by the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil (CNBB), for the first printing of that material.
- 3.
The basic outline of the present text reproduces the same logic of another recent publication, with the title “Brazil, Catholic religion and education: challenges and prospects” (Follmann 2017), in which I had the opportunity to synthesize in the first part the contribution of Streck and Segala (2007), here quoted. I take up here some passages of the 2017 article, with the novelty, on the one hand, of the reflection on the impacts in the classroom and, on the other, of the addition of the recent debate on the most appropriate forms of socio-educational inclusion practices.
- 4.
The document that today best expresses all the trajectory and advances lived in terms of the Church in Latin America in the last decades and its current situation is the document of Aparecida do Norte, Brazil, in 2007. In this sense, see Jaci de Fátima Candiotto. A Educação Cristã na atual Cultura a partir do Documento de Aparecida. XI National Congress of Education (EDUCERE), 2013, PUC-PR.
- 5.
El 30 de octubre de 2007 ocurrió la incorporación de la Asociación Brasileira de Escolas Superiores Católicas (ABESC) y de la Asociación Nacional de Mantenedoras de Escolas Católicas (ANAMEC) en la Asociación de Educación Católica (AEC), que pasó a denominado a Asociación Nacional de Educación Católica do Brasil (ANEC), en funcionamiento con este nombre desde 2008.
- 6.
- 7.
The research of the Data-Folha Institute of July 2018, Sao Paulo, Brazil shows 51% Catholics and 33% Evangelicals. In addition to the visible explosion in the number of evangelicals, other aspects must be considered, since there are still controversies regarding research methodologies, and the diversity may be even greater due to the multiplication of the “double religious identity,” combining segments of African matrix and spiritualistic practices with an external Catholic “facade.
- 8.
What always weighed most heavily on these “relapses” were the “considerable spaces in the areas of health, education, leisure and culture” that the Catholic Church continued and continues to occupy. A very recent event was particularly disturbing in the harmonious evolution of the relations of the lay State with the religious sphere in Brazil. This is the Agreement between the Brazilian State and the Holy See signed in 2008, a document that raised much controversy. In response to this agreement, the General Law on Religions, presented in 2009, was created in order to change the content of the agreement in question, extending it to other religious denominations. According to researcher Fischmann (2009), this is an “attempt to correct an incorrigible error”.
- 9.
Federal Law No. 12.101/2009, Certification of Social Assistance Charitable Entity (CEBAS,), with the issuance of Regulatory Ordinance No. 15, published on August 14, 2009 legislates on the conditions required for the Certification in guideline. Obviously, the determination of a scholarship for every five paid students is not tout-court, since the Law allows for partial scholarships and material support for scholarship holders to be calculated within the total. This applies to basic education, but it also applies to higher education under the same scheme already practiced by PROUNI, Universidad para Todos, since 2005.
- 10.
Today, CEBAS certification is in force.
- 11.
The research was recently initiated and is in its exploratory phase for the construction of an interdisciplinary project on educational effectiveness according to the values of Catholic educational institutions, with the modalities in guideline.
- 12.
There are cases where this is a historical institutional practice of the congregation.
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Follmann SJ, J.I. (2021). Catholic Education in Contemporary Brazil: A Story of Questions for Classroom Practice. In: Imbarack, P., Madero SJ, C. (eds) Catholic Education in Latin America. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75059-6_8
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