FROM CONSTITUTIONAL EQUALITY TO PEDAGOGICAL JUSTICE: ANTI-RACIST EDUCATION AND SECULARISM IN THE FUTURE OF BRAZILIAN SCHOOLS

Abstract

This essay analyzes the historical and structural distance between the principle of formal equality established by the 1988 Federal Constitution and its concrete implementation in the Brazilian educational field, questioning to what extent the educational system has been able to transform constitutional guarantees into effectively anti-racist pedagogical practices. Although the constitutional text ensures, in its article 5, item VI, freedom of conscience and belief, reaffirming the secular nature of the State, such guarantees encounter obstacles when confronted with pedagogical practices marked by the centrality of Eurocentric epistemologies and the marginalization of Afro-Brazilian, Indigenous, and Quilombola knowledge. The analysis engages with theoretical contributions from critical curriculum thinking and with anti-racist and decolonial perspectives, highlighting authors such as Abdias Nascimento, Antônio Bispo dos Santos, Nilma Lino Gomes, Kabengele Munanga. Based on this reflection, a model for the epistemological reorganization of the Brazilian public school system is proposed, based on three institutional devices: Territorial Epistemic Confluence System, Evaluation through Epistemic Justice, and Laboratory for Curricular Decolonization. It is argued that overcoming structural racism in education requires more than the thematic inclusion of content in curricula, demanding a transformation in the forms of production, circulation, and legitimation of school knowledge.