The (Im) Possibilities of the Common: An Opinion on the Erasing of Differences in Brazilian Curriculum Reform

Recently approved by the Brazilian Senate, following the unfortunate success of the National Curriculum Common Core’s trends1, the High School Curriculum Reform was the key event that motivated this manuscript and the aim to look to our peers for knowledge exchange and political support. Since we are congregate her as history teachers, we are dismayed at the total withdrawal of this discipline from high school curricula in Brazil. Not only history, but all other segments of the social sciences have lost importance in the new unified curricula in Brazil Following Arendt [2]. we contend that the growing loss of tradition and forgetting about the past is one of the greatest problems of contemporary society, and often the main reason for deep global crises. Considering natality2 to be the essence of education, the author affirms the necessity of respecting history and of maintaining the common world3. In this direction, historicity is composed of intense negotiation, a negotiation that involves human relations and the various political interests that determine the rhythms of each community. We therefore underscore the importance of teaching history within the basic school curriculum, exalting its political and social importance both in the Brazilian and in the world context, not as a vehicle distributing the meanings of democracy in a way common to all, but as spacetime [3], in which the rewriting of stories and living historicities is what exists and creates the common, as a community of differences [4]. The High School Curriculum Reform erases all possible relationships and wealth of knowledge that legitimizes the field of history, as a political and community building praxis. Following Arendt, we look at the present, when public and democratic schools are being threatened by a conservative neoliberal tsunami [1] that commercializes education, censures free thinking, and demonizes teachers for not achieving efficiency and uniform results, per Pinar [5]. Agreeing with Pinar we defend that the curriculum is a compacted conversation among all the society bringing historicities and subjectivities, layering narratives, weaving nets of knowledge and solidarity [3] and disrupting the fantasies of harmony with dissensus, diversity, difference, blindness and unblindness movements [4].