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Billions of Reais Flow in Brazilian Education, but Those Who Should Be the Center of Decisions Remain Invisible. Private Organizations Gain Protagonism, While Teachers Remain Marginalized in a System That Promises Transformation but Delivers Inequality and Business Interests Disguised as Innovation.
Billions of reais move through the Brazilian education sector every year.
However, this money rarely reaches the teacher who is in the classroom.
According to historian Valter Mattos da Costa, the education system in Brazil is increasingly subordinated to private interests, especially those linked to financial capital.
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Luciano Hang claims persecution after Havan was notified for using the Brazilian flag on shopping bags.
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Instead of teacher protagonism, what we see is the growing influence of NGOs, corporate foundations, and institutes financed by large economic groups.
The Invisible Power That Makes Decisions in Basic Education
Valter Mattos, a PhD in Economic History from USP, warns that those who hold the pen to decide the paths of public education often have never set foot in a classroom.
In 2023, a report from the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo revealed that the foundation of businessman Jorge Paulo Lemann, the Lemann Foundation, began to have direct influence over decisions involving about R$ 6.6 billion from the Ministry of Education (MEC).
The NGO MegaEdu, created in 2022 and financed by Lemann, signed an agreement with MEC to work in the area of school connectivity.
Its CEO, Cristieni de Castilhos – who is also a former employee of the Lemann Foundation – was appointed to the management council of FUST (Universalization Fund for Telecommunications Services), responsible for managing R$ 2.74 billion for internet projects in schools.
“These are movements that illustrate the advance of private institutions over the strategic decisions of public education”, Mattos claims.
Executives Without Classroom Experience Decide the Future of Public Schools
Priscila Cruz, executive president of the NGO Todos Pela Educação, has a degree in Public Administration from Harvard Kennedy School.
Denis Mizne, director of the Lemann Foundation, is a lawyer graduated from USP.
Claudia Costin, founder of CEIPE, has a long career in educational management but has also never worked as a teacher in basic education.
Mattos harshly criticizes this reality: “These are people who speak with authority about the school routine without ever having lived the daily life of a public school. This undermines any proposal for real change”.
Even foundations like Santillana or the National Campaign for the Right to Education, which oppose the New High School, have a more bureaucratic than pedagogical profile.
Private Organizations Set the Rules, Teachers Are Ignored
According to Mattos, this distance between those who decide and those who execute is one of the biggest problems in Brazilian education.
He states that NGOs and private institutes, funded by banks and large corporations such as Itaú Social, Fundação Bradesco, and Instituto Unibanco, have enough power to decisively influence public policies.
Data from the Central Bank, Federal Revenue, and the Transparency Portal prove that significant volumes of resources flow from these institutions to the so-called third sector.
These investments, often presented as philanthropy, are, according to Mattos, “legal mechanisms of cultural domination that produce individuals adapted to the system and not critical citizens”.
Ideology Disguised as Innovation
Mattos refers to philosopher Antonio Gramsci to classify these foundations as “private apparatuses of hegemony”, structures that maintain the ideological dominance of the ruling classes.
According to him, such entities are not neutral: they act to maintain the social structures that ensure the power of capital.
Along the same reasoning, he cites Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Žižek.
The former points out that economic elites shape educational systems to create conformist labor.
Žižek denounces that the dominant ideology disguises itself as benevolence and neutrality, as if they were nonpartisan or purely technical projects.
“These discourses fit perfectly into Žižek’s critical analysis,” emphasizes Mattos.
The New High School as an Example of Business Hegemony
The reform of the New High School, strongly promoted by these private organizations, is seen as a trademark case.
Promised as innovation, the new educational structure reduced critical content and increased superficial subjects, emptying the reflective role of the school.
Mattos denounces that this change “markets modernization while limiting student access to broad and critical education”.
Projects such as “electives” and “life projects” occupy time slots that were previously allocated to essential subjects for the ENEM, such as History and Philosophy.
A School Made by Those Who Do Not Teach
“It is not about rejecting dialogue with civil society, but about denouncing the absence of the teacher’s voice in the decisions that directly affect their work,” argues the historian.
For him, “quality education, transformative and socially just demands protagonism from those on the front lines of the classroom”.
While educators remain undervalued, the business logic transforms the school into a laboratory of bureaucratic experiments.
If nothing changes, according to Mattos, the system will continue to produce docile labor without critical sense, perpetuating social inequalities under the guise of modernization.
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