Teachers Sue to Void Governor Doria’s Recall of School Textbooks, Court Agrees

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – A group of professors from public universities in São Paulo took legal action on Tuesday, September 10th, with the intention to annul the act of Governor João Doria who collected textbooks from the state public school network.

The governor considered that the educational material, destined for the students of the 8th year of school, praised what he calls “gender ideology“.

The professors are from the University of São Paulo (USP), Campinas State University (UNICAMP), ABC Federal University (UFABC), São Paulo Federal University (UNIFESP), São Carlos Federal University (UFSCar), and the Federal Institute of São Paulo (IFSP).

Teachers petitioned for an injunction to immediately suspend the collection and recall of the textbooks. They also petitioned for them not to be “discarded, destroyed, or broken” and that they should be returned to all schools and students in perfect condition.

On September 3rd, Doria wrote on his Twitter profile that the government had been alerted to “an unacceptable error in the school material for 8th-grade students in public schools” and asked for a check on those responsible for the book. “We don’t agree and we don’t accept the praise of gender ideology,” the governor said.

The teachers who came forward called the recall of the textbook “censorship” and argued that the material presents different forms of expression of human sexuality.

The book includes a text called “Biological Sex, Gender Identity, and Sexual Orientation,” which addresses sexual diversity and explains different terms, such as “transgender,” “homosexual,” and “bisexual. In the case of “transgender,” for example, the definition is “a person who was born with a certain biological sex but does not identify with his or her body.”

The teachers contend that Doria violated the Constitution, educational legislation, and the Common National Basic Curriculum (BNCC). “It is unacceptable that a recently approved curriculum document that advocates the teaching of socio-cultural, affective and ethical aspects of sexuality, be used to justify acts of censorship and there is no justification for it,” said UFABC professor Fernando Cássio, one of the plaintiffs in the legal action.

For professor Salomão Ximenes, also from UFABC, the governor’s act was authoritarian. “The authoritarianism of the act of censorship violated basic rules of functioning of the educational system and the right to education,” Ximenes said in a statement. “It is not up to the governor to produce a curriculum based on his own ideology; this is a task that the law assigns to education professionals following the curriculum guidelines approved by the competent authorities”.

The lawsuit was filed with the support of the Human Rights Advocacy Collective (CADHu).

Later on Tuesday, September 10th, a court ordered suspension of the collection of the science textbooks.

In addition, Judge Paula Fernanda de Souza determined that the textbooks already collected must be kept and returned to students within 48 hours. In case of non-compliance, the government must pay a fine.

“There is no doubt that the collection of this material would remove content of the whole bimester from various areas of human knowledge to eighth-graders in the public school system, with real detriment to learning,” said the judge in her decision.

Furthermore, the decision also considered that “the damage to public property and the treasury are sufficiently demonstrated, since the textbook was distributed to all students in the public network (about 330,000 textbooks), with obvious costs to the state treasury, after regular approval by the state bodies in charge”.

In a note, the Secretary of Education of the State of São Paulo said he has not been notified of the Court’s decision. He further said that they had “collected the material in question because the approach ‘no one is born man or woman’ expressed in the book is erroneous for not being scientifically grounded”.

Source: G1