The (another) Bolsonaro coup in Brazil

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro this Friday. Andre Penner (AP)

While in Brazil a large part of the media discuss daily the possibility that President Jair Bolsonaro is preparing an authoritarian coup if he loses the elections, another type of coup, already in action, is silenced.

One that would return the country to the feudal times of princes and vassals.

This is the introduction of the so-called “family school”, which would allow families to educate their children at home without the need to attend public school.

This would be a throwback to the times when only the sons of the nobility had the right to education while the

remained illiterate.

The approval of a law to correct the constitutional text that requires that children between the ages of four and 17 be educated in public schools is underway in silence with little or no repercussion in the press.

In fact, the amendment to the Constitution has already been voted on and approved in Congress with 264 votes in favor and 144 against and must now be endorsed by the Senate.

If approved, the new law would constitute a throwback to the times when knowledge was limited to the aristocracy and would constitute a blow to the republican progress of offering knowledge to all without distinction, which has characterized democratic societies.

The idea of ​​Bolsonaro and his hosts is to prevent children from being indoctrinated in public schools with "leftist ideas" and on issues of sexuality, one of his great obsessions.

The terror of the extreme right is that in schools they talk to students about issues of gender diversity.

His terror of homosexuality is such that he has confessed that before seeing a son arrive at his house "on the arm of a mustachioed man he would prefer to see him dead run over by a truck."

Public education, as is known, was and continues to be one of the greatest achievements of humanity to end the shameful division between the enlightened and the illiterate that afflicted millions of people excluded from knowledge for centuries.

Put an end to this social conquest that is one of the greatest achievements of democracies means going back to the days of the caves.

Obsessed with the idea that in public schools children are "perverted" with subversive ideas, Bolsonaro believes that families should be in charge of teaching their children, without thinking that this would mean that while the rich continue to send their children to private schools, the poor – who are the majority – would send them to work to help the family financially as in the past.

From the beginning, the Bolsonaro government has seen as a waste what is spent on public education, whose budget has been cut more and more, while his Ministers of Education have so far been openly reactionary and even evangelical pastors who came to propose that in schools all subjects were taught only with the book of the Bible.

Diminishing or discrediting public schools as Bolsonaro is attempting means denying the fundamental republican principle of the right of everyone, rich and poor, to know, the only instrument that can put an end to the bloody inequalities that debase society and make it more vulnerable to abuses of power by the privileged classes.

In Brazil there are still millions of illiterate people or those who have only completed basic education, and until not many years ago it was considered normal that studying was a thing for the rich, while the children of the poor had to work as their parents always did.

Pretending that these millions of families are capable of teaching their children at home is today a slap in the face to common sense.

It is precisely within these families that Bolsonaro considers that they should send their children to school for fear that at school they may "be perverted" with so-called "modernist" ideas, where sadly there is the greatest burden of domestic violence and where children are condemned. to see as normal that the world is divided between those who study and those who work, sad legacy of a slavery that Brazil was the last in the world to abolish.

As Breno Altman, editor of

, wrote today : “In a Brazil where quality education is becoming increasingly elitist, available in exclusive institutions for millionaires, domestic education is a perverse way to weaken public schools, opening a new gap to save the education budget”.

The most talked about topic today in the media and on social networks is the possibility that Bolsonaro is preparing a coup together with a part of the military loyal to him if he sees that he could lose the elections.

In reality, the real blow, that of putting an end to public education, has already begun quietly, with the complicity of a Congress that it is managing to buy off with millions in aid, while galloping inflation hits the weakest and drags down millions of families to the horror of hunger in a country that feeds half the world with its natural wealth.

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