National curricula and citizenship education in populist times. The cases of Brazil and Spain

ABSTRACT

Despite increasing attention to citizenship education since the turn of the 21st century, the recent spread of authoritarian populism worldwide has raised relatively little attention in educational policy and research. As a result, the possibilities and limitations that national curricula offer to educators to deal with this phenomenon are still rather uncertain. In this article, we develop an analytical framework based on the key features of authoritarian populism and critical citizenship education to compare the elements and scope for addressing populism in the national curricula of Brazil and Spain, two countries where national populism is particularly widespread. This paper examines the extent to which national curricula in these countries include goals and content that enable teachers to address the complexities of this phenomenon ranging from political polarisation through to the exaltation of national identities.

KEYWORDS:

• Authoritarian populism
• critical citizenship education
• national curricula
• Brazil
• Spain

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The Brazilian military dictatorship was a coup carried out by the Brazilian army under the justification that Brazil was on the verge of becoming a communist country. For its supporters, this was the 1964 revolution, an expression used by the current president Jair Bolsonaro.

2. The progressive government of Rousseff developed a proposal in 2015 to create the first national curriculum, even though states could still determine part of the final curriculum. The final document, Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC; Brazilian Learning Standards), had three versions. The first two were passed during the government of Dilma Rousseff. The third was introduced by the more conservative government of Michel Temer (2016–2018), with an intense participation of several political and social agents (Michetti 2020). During the drafting process of this last version, there was intense political polarisation, strong criticism of the government from the Workers’ Party and a rise of a conservative wave in the country (Burity 2020). Different agents participated in its creation. Many of them were linked to business groups and conservative/religious movements such as Escola sem Partido (Non-Partisan School) (Macedo 2017; Michetti 2020).

3. This measure has already been approved in Murcia, a region ruled by ‘Vox’. The controversy generated by this measure reached the Spanish Government that considered this policy to be potentially unconstitutional (Álvarez Rodríguez 2020).

4. See the historical educational and historical curricular research that has traced the latent presence of nationalist ideology in what Raimundo Cuesta calls the ‘visible texts’ of instruction (decrees and other legislative texts, as well as school textbooks, especially History textbooks) such as Boyd (2000), Cuesta (1997) or Schissler and Soysal (2005).