Universalization of Basic Education in Brazil: a long path

Abstract

This article results from an extensive bibliographical and documentary research developed between August 2014 and November 2016, whose purpose was to understand the construction of the rights to education in Brazil and the universalization of basic education. Of historical and sociological nature, the study demonstrates that the oligarchic roots of the State, as well as the slave-owning and authoritarian culture of society, delayed to the maximum the positivation of the rights to free public education. The primary education, lasting from 2 to 5 years, was structured from 1920 through the state reforms. Minimum compulsory schooling of 8 years was established only in 1971 (Law 5.692); of 9 years, in 2006 (Law 11,274) and 14 years (from 4 to 17 years old, involving basic education, including for young people and adults who did not have access to their own age) in 2009 (Constitutional Amendment 59 ). Although the Brazilian State recognized education as a social right in the 1930s, it was only in 1988 that compulsory education was assumed by the Constitution as a subjective public right. In approving this principle, the Constitution introduced an important legal instrument to control the performance of state power. This is an important innovation in the means that some situations are established in which the public power has the duty to ensure and do, to the benefit of the individual's interest of the citizen.