Brazil’s national education system and how it was thought

Abstract

This article discusses the meanings attributed to the term “national” from the New Education Pioneers’ Manifesto (Manifesto dos Pioneiros da Educação Nova) from 1932 until the approval of the new National Education Plan (Plano Nacional de Educação) in 2014. Our analysis uses history to expose how different discursive formations of political and constitutive sociability of Nation-States produced different means of regulating education systems. In Brazil, a tutelary State has been responsible for forming and recognizing the people of the nation and educational science, through a discursive construction legitimating attempts to plan an educational system under the regulation of a professional bureaucratic matrix. The use of the term national system refers to the voicing of actors and the territorial coverage of institutional mechanisms of educational management. In the National Education Plan 2014-2024, the term “national” refers to the proposal of regulation mechanisms and devices that evaluate the extension of distributive policies based on performance.