Brazil’s Education Minister: Brazil’s Youths, Lacking Faith, Are ‘Existential Zombies’

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – On Thursday, September 10th, Minister of Education Milton Ribeiro said that part of Brazil’s youths have become “existential zombies” who no longer believe in God.

In an event to launch policies against mutilation and suicide, the Minister, who is also a Presbyterian pastor, stated that the world is experiencing a moment of “deconstruction of everything”, which leaves the young public with no reference or motivation.

“Today in Brazil we have true existential zombies, motivated, I believe, by this rupture of absolutes and certainties. They don’t believe in anything anymore, from God to politics. They have no motivation,” he said.

In his address, the Minister also stated that youths have been experiencing an “existential void,” which, in his opinion, encourages adolescents to live with no purpose and to take “their own lives”.

Experts in suicide prevention warn that there is no evidence of a correlation between religiosity and suicide and urge the population to be cautious about spreading what they refer to as harmful myths.

“We are living a moment of deconstruction of everything. Of all that is values, of all that is absolute. Of all the certainties in life,” he said. “There is no longer a youth that believes in such things as God, religion, politics, and the family. They completely lose references,” he emphasized.

According to him, the “great fad of sociologists and philosophers” is to deconstruct values and ideas and fail to put “something in their place,” so “they leave a void.”

The Minister also criticized the content of educational materials that, in his opinion, offer perspectives that are inappropriate for the age group in question.

“When I examine the books at the Ministry of Education, old books, I see some criticism that would be appropriate, perhaps, for an almost young person, not for a sixth-grade child,” he said. “They are discussions and historical deconstructions that, in my opinion, are inappropriate for that age group,” he said.

Ribeiro was chosen by President Jair Bolsonaro in a nod to both the evangelical bench and the ideological core of the Ministries Esplanade.

In the past, before taking over the portfolio, he advocated educating children through “pain”. “Correction is required for healing. It will not be obtained by just means and gentle methods,” he said.

The use of corporal punishment in children was banned by the ECA (Statute of the Child and Adolescent), after the sanction of the Palmada Law in 2014, which amended the law governing the statute.

It was thus established that children are educated and cared for without the use of corporal punishment or “cruel or degrading treatment, as forms of correction, discipline, education”.

Source: Folha de S.Paulo