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Billions of reais are being spent on Brazilian education, but those who should be at the center of decision-making remain invisible. Private organizations are gaining prominence, while teachers remain marginalized in a system that promises transformation but delivers inequality and business interests disguised as innovation.
Billions of reais move the Brazilian education sector every year.
However, this money rarely reaches the teacher that 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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Instead of teaching protagonism, what we see is the growing influence of NGOs, business foundations and institutes financed by large economic groups.
The invisible power that makes decisions in basic education
Valter Mattos, PhD in Economic History from USP, warns that those who hold the pen in their hands to decide the direction of public education have often never set foot in a classroom.
In 2023, a newspaper report The State of S. Paul revealed that businessman Jorge Paulo Lemann's foundation, the Lemann Foundation, began to have direct influence over decisions involving around R$6,6 billion of the the Ministry of Education (MEC):.
The NGO MegaEdu, created in 2022 and financed by Lemann, signed an agreement with the 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 board 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 strategic decisions in public education,” says Mattos.
Executives with no classroom experience decide the direction of public schools
Priscila Cruz, executive president of the NGO Todos Pela Educação, has a degree in Public Administration from the 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 never worked as a teacher in primary education.
Mattos harshly criticizes this reality: “These are people who speak with authority about everyday school life without ever having experienced the routine of a public school. This weakens any proposal for real change.”
Even foundations like Santillana or the National Campaign for the Right to Education, which oppose the New Secondary Education, have a more bureaucratic than pedagogical profile.
Private organizations dictate 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 claims that NGOs and private institutes, financed 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 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, which form individuals adapted to the system and not critical citizens”.
Ideology disguised as innovation
Mattos uses the philosopher Antonio Gramsci to classify these foundations as “private apparatuses of hegemony”, structures that maintain the ideological dominance of the dominant classes.
According to him, such entities are not neutral: they act to maintain the social structures that guarantee the power of capital.
In the same line of reasoning, he cites Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Žižek.
The first points out that economic elites shape educational systems to create a conformist workforce.
Žižek denounces that the dominant ideology disguises itself as benevolence and neutrality, as if they were non-partisan or purely technical projects.
“These speeches fit perfectly into Žižek’s critical analysis,” Mattos highlights.
The New High School as an example of corporate hegemony
The reform of the New Secondary Education, strongly promoted by these private organizations, is seen as an emblematic case.
Promised as innovation, the new educational structure reduced critical content and increased superficial subjects, emptying the school's reflective role.
Mattos denounces that this change “sells modernization while limiting students’ access to broad and critical education.”
Projects such as “electives” and “life projects” take up time that was 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 teachers’ voices in decisions that directly affect their work,” argues the historian.
For him, “quality, transformative and socially just education requires protagonism from those who are on the front line in the classroom”.
While educators continue to be undervalued, business logic transforms schools into laboratories for bureaucratic experiments.
If nothing changes, according to Mattos, the system will continue to produce docile and uncritical labor, perpetuating social inequalities under the guise of modernization.
