Luta de classes e reforma do ensino médio: a destruição das forças produtivas e o movimento pela revogação do Nem

Abstract

The central issue of this research, developed within the Graduate Program in Education at FACED/UFBA, concerns Educational Reforms — particularly the counter-reform of Brazilian Secondary Education — formalized by Law No. 13,415/2017 and reconfigured by Law No. 14,945/2024, as an expression of the class struggle within a context of deepening capitalist crisis and the destruction of productive forces. The research problem arises from the observation that this “reform” was carried out under the strong influence of the business sector, especially through organizations such as the “Todos Pela Educação” (All for Education) Movement and the Lemann Foundation, which have steered educational policy to serve market demands to the detriment of a critical, comprehensive, and emancipatory education for the working class. In this sense, the guiding scientific questions sought to answer: How was business influence structured in the formulation and implementation of the New Secondary Education policy? What legal, political, and ideological mechanisms sustained this intervention? And in what ways did social and political resistance organize itself around the demand for the repeal of this measure? The research questions are articulated around the characterization of the actions of the business bourgeoisie across different governments since 2016, identifying the strategies of educational commodification and mapping the social, labor, and student movements that opposed the degradation of Secondary Education, while proposing pedagogical alternatives aligned with a public, critical, and emancipatory education. The Theoretical-Methodological framework, within the exploratory study, prioritized epistemological approaches that establish connections and relationships between the logical and the historical, as well as between facts and their historical contextualization within the capitalist political economy. The objective, therefore, is to present, in summary form, that history is made of class struggles — an idea reflected today in the actions of the business sector, which positions itself as the “reformer” of Secondary Education but, in reality, seeks to adapt education to its own interests without breaking with the logic of exploitation and social barbarism. This process, however, faces resistance from organized sectors of the working class. We thus conclude that the educational reform represents an expression of antagonistic class struggle in times of capital crisis, emphasizing the need for active, critical, and organized resistance by the working class in order to reclaim the school as a space for the transmission and production of scientific, artistic, and philosophical knowledge accumulated by humanity — from the perspective of overcoming the capitalist mode of production.