Mac Margolis, Columnist

Brazilian Schools Are Ideological Battlefields

Partisan passions don't stop at the schoolhouse door.

April 26, 2016 at 7:46 PM UTC

Mac Margolis is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin and South America. He is the author of “The Last New World: The Conquest of the Amazon Frontier.”

What are they learning?
Photographer: YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP/Getty Images

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Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is on the verge of being thrown out of office. A rolling corruption scandal has roiled the country, and the entire political establishment seems to be at war with itself. So you might hope education would exercise a moderating influence on the nation, training students to think critically and tempering their partisan passions.

Good luck with that. These days, Brazilian schools have been swept up in the national funk. Instead of promoting scholarly inquiry, classrooms are often political battlegrounds, with students enlisted in the fray.