ABSTRACT
The Brazilian political conjuncture suffered abrupt changes after a judicial-parliamentary
coup against the President Dilma Rousseff in April, 2016. In the educational field, contrary to
the thoughts of educators and theoreticians of education, the new government, chaired by
Michel Temer, approves the Reform of Secondary Education, by means of the Law nº 13.415 /
2017. This study analyses aspects that involve the function of the teaching work, curriculum
and science teaching, with a special focus on biology teaching within Brazilian education and
its new model of secondary education implemented according to the Law 13.415 / 2017. The
present work has the main objective to analyze the sociopolitical role of biology teaching
since the proposal of the Secondary Education Reform. It also seeks to understand the role of
biology as to the student‘s education in the text and context of the new law, discussing
political and ideological aspects of education in the current Brazilian context, in which
conservatism grows and threatens political and social rights. This study has a qualitative
approach and was divided into two stages. The first one consists of bibliographical researches
and documentary analyzes. In this part, besides analyzing federal documents on the policies,
laws and educational reforms of the last five years, some theorists such as Dermeval Saviani,
Miguel Arroyo, Carlos Libâneo, José Contreras, Ernst Mayr, Myriam Krasilchik and others
contribute to the analysis of the problem in focus. The second stage focuses on the field
research, in which interviews with biology teachers from the public secondary school in the
city of Jaguaribe, Ceará, were conducted. The analyzes of the interviews and the reflections
made during the construction of this work show that the reform of secondary education meets
the demands of the sectors linked to the market, through a neoliberal conception of education,
directing the last stage of Brazilian basic education to a professional formation in the
detriment of a single education of general culture, socially referenced, for all. The process and
approval of this reform happened in an antidemocratic way against the wishes of education
theorists and teachers of the different levels of education and favoring the pragmatic interests
of the market. In the perception of the subjects studied and in the analysis of educational
policies, in particular the reform of secondary education, and inside it, the place of teaching
biology, the reform of secondary education is an attack on democracy, since it tends to
reinforce the social segregation, vocational education for the poor and propaedeutic education
for the children of the favored classes. With regard to science education, reform can weaken
education by making it more incipient for those who do not choose the scientific training axis.
I conclude that the reform of secondary education tends to promote a regression of the
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Brazilian Basic Education previous to the decade of 1980, when emphasis was placed on the
technical-professional education and to the years of 1990, when the educational policy was
subjugated to the neoliberal directives for the education. It is also observed that the process
and the approval of the reform happened in an extremely undemocratic way, attending to the
political anxieties of the market.
Keywords: Brazilian Education. Neoliberalism. Secondary Education Reform. Science
Teaching.
