The bolsonaro’s government literacy policy: reducionism and coloniality

Abstract

This article discusses the Bolsonaro Government's National Literacy Policy (PNA) in order to understand its antecedents and the theoretical-methodological principles that underlie it, based on the analysis of the report Child’s Literacy – new paths, produced by the Chamber of Deputies and the text of the PNA on the MEC website. We used documental analysis inspired by studies on coloniality and Paulo Freire's Pedagogy. The results indicate a break with all the scientific production on literacy already carried out in the country. This proposal transposes the literacy models of the United States and England and is based on an outdated conception of literacy, based on experimentalist and positivist research that reduces writing to the phoneme-grapheme relationship. A literacy policy for Brazil needs to consider the immense inequality in access to written culture. It needs to take into account the knowledge accumulated by teachers in their work with literacy, the inequality in the material conditions of the schools, the particular ways in which writing is used in society depending on the socioeconomic condition, geography, gender, the level of schooling of the families, race, among others. We defend an attitude of epistemic decolonization, of recognition of the knowledge and epistemologies produced from the global south as a form of resistance to the imperialist-colonialist logic that materializes in the public policies for education of the government that ends this year, spent a great deal of volume of public resources without positive consequences for education and literacy.