Pedagogia decolonial e história da educação brasileira: a colonialidade do ser, do saber e do poder

Abstract

This article, qualitative and bibliographic in nature, investigates the persistence of coloniality in Brazilian education and proposes foundations for a decolonial pedagogy. The research draws upon concepts of the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being—developed by authors such as Aníbal Quijano, Catherine Walsh, Walter Mignolo, Nilma Gomes, Frantz Fanon, and Aimé Césaire—to demonstrate that European modernity was built upon the expropriation of territories, knowledge systems, and bodies, and that such hierarchical, Eurocentric structures persist even after the formal end of colonialism. The study critically analyzes the history of Brazilian education, from the work of the Jesuits in the 16th century to the reforms of the military dictatorship, highlighting how schooling was systematically used as an instrument of racial domination, epistemicide, and the exclusion of the working classes, while simultaneously ensuring a humanistic education for the elites. Drawing on the work of Paulo Freire and Catherine Walsh, the study points to the need to break away from the "banking" model of education and intellectual alienation, proposing an anti-racist, anti-colonial form of education constructed alongside the subjects themselves, grounded in their own realities and historically marginalized forms of knowledge.