In a ceremony held this Thursday afternoon, September 22, President Michel Temer signed the Provisional Measure (MP) that reformulates secondary education in Brazil. The ceremony was also attended by the Minister of Education, Mendonça Filho, and governors and representatives of the federative units.
The New High School provides for the implementation of the school on a full-time basis, with 7 hours of classes per day in 200 school days. With this, the annual workload will go from 800 to 1400 hours. The increase will be gradual and will start in the first half of 2017.
The controversial point of the New High School is the curriculum flexibility. The proposal defines a Common National Base in the 1st year and a curriculum aimed at the 2nd and 3rd year of high school. Only the teaching of Portuguese language and mathematics will be mandatory in all years.
From the 2nd year of high school, the student will have the autonomy to choose an area to further study, among five options: Languages, Human Sciences, Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Professional Technical Education. Until that year, high school had 13 mandatory subjects.
Exclusion of subjects
The text of the MP excludes the subjects of Arts, Physical Education, Philosophy and Sociology of the compulsory high school grade. These subjects are now optional in high school. Arts and Physical Education remain mandatory in kindergarten and elementary school. The English subject becomes mandatory from the sixth year of elementary school onwards.
Do not stop now... There's more after the advertising ;)
UPDATE: MEC misses MP and states that it will not exclude subjects in high school
Justifications
The education minister began his speech by saying that high school is bankrupt. According to Mendonça Filho, reforms in secondary education are necessary because the Education Development Index Basic (Ideb) has been stagnant since 2011 and young people's knowledge of Portuguese language and mathematics has deteriorated to the level of 1997.
Resources
The Federal Government is going to invest R$1.5 billion over two years to implement full-time schools in the states and the Federal District. The expectation is to enroll 500,000 young people full-time by 2018.
It's not law yet
The MP comes into effect as of its signature, but to become a law it needs to be analyzed by a special congressional commission and then approved by the Chamber and the Senate. This needs to happen within 120 days for the MP not to expire.
And either
At the ceremony, nothing was said about the National High School Exam (And either). However, if the MP becomes law, Enem will have to adapt to the new high school in 2017. The Enem Reference Matrix has not changed since 2009.
