ABSTRACT
The obscurantist and backward-looking approach to education of the Bolsonaro government has a long history in Brazil, going back to the Counter-Reformation in Portugal and a narrow franchise well into the 20th century, which excluded illiterates until 1985. From the Lei Saraiva in the Empire until modern times, this hostility to popular education was rooted in the fear and suspicion of elites that handing the power of the vote to ordinary people would lead to disaster. Real progress only ensued after the 1988 Constitution, particularly under the governments of Lula and Rousseff. A chaotic period under Bolsonaro, with four weird Ministers in four years, saw education become a front in their culture war on the left, meddling in the exam system, a short-lived attempt to create “civic-military schools” and systemic mismanagement.
