Education
January 16, 2026
Letters that draw maps: laws and practice in the educational field
When read together, they indicate paths, limits, and orientation trails for educational practice
The launch of the National Simple Language Policy (law nº 15.263/2025), whose aim is to facilitate communication between the public authorities and citizens, has once again stirred the field of education. Since its enactment, doubts have arisen about how it becomes correct — or not — to express oneself, accompanied by criticisms, praise, and practical concerns. It is inevitable that it should be so. Education, as an essential public service under the responsibility of the State, constitutes a social and institutional field marked by encounters, disputes, and syntheses between different currents of thought.
In a country of continental dimensions like Brazil, marked by deep regional, cultural, and socioeconomic inequalities, these disputes intensify. Ensuring equity in such a vast territory — from customs to material living conditions — requires education to be organized as a structured public policy, but also as a permanent space for negotiation between distinct societal projects. The laws that regulate this field do not emerge as formal ornaments nor as simple bureaucratic records: they are historical responses to real conflicts and attempts to order what is, by nature, plural and tense.
In the school routine, however, it is not always possible to immediately understand the broader objectives of a new law, which is added to so many others and piled onto the daily tasks that need to be attended to. It is not uncommon for the first feeling in the face of novelty to be something like “here comes another law”. Another equally common expression is the well-known “law for show” — the perception that, in the absence of enforcement, little will change in practice.
To avoid falling into these traps of low common sense, it may be possible to adopt a method of reading to deal with laws, especially those related to education. Instead of seeing them as a indistinct heap of obligations, it may be more productive to understand them as letters that draw maps: normative signals that, when read together, indicate paths, limits, and trails of guidance for educational practice.
The Constitution as a guide
The first step of this method is to understand that all laws are infraconstitutional. This means that they are below the Federal Constitution and exist to fulfill what was deliberated, debated, and enshrined by the Constituent Assembly of 1988. This process was neither casual nor rushed. Years of research, intense debates, and contributions from specialists in various fields preceded each constitutional formulation, in an attempt to define, with clarity and objectivity, what should guide collective life and the action of the State.
In the field of education, this constitutional guideline is synthesized, above all, in articles 205 and 214 of the Federal Constitution, which affirm education as a right of all and a duty of the State and the family, oriented towards the full development of the person, the exercise of citizenship, and qualification for work, in addition to establishing guidelines, goals, and strategies for its organization in a collaborative regime. These provisions function as a large normative umbrella: it is under it that all other educational laws are sheltered.
The supralegislative laws that stem from this framework also do not emerge ready-made or in isolation. Before reaching their final wording, they go through a long process of technical and political debate, passing through thematic committees and, decisively, through the Constitution and Justice Committees, responsible for examining their compatibility with the Constitution, their legal coherence, and their technical adequacy. It is in this process that concepts are tested, terms are adjusted, and ambiguities are addressed, until the legal text reaches a constitutionally valid and socially applicable form.
The map layers: three types of laws
From this constitutional north, it is possible to organize educational laws into three major layers, which function as reading levels of the normative map.
The first layer is composed of the structuring laws of state systems and duties. These are norms that organize the very architecture of educational policy, distributing responsibilities among federative entities and transforming constitutional principles into enforceable legal obligations. This group includes the Law of Directives and Bases of National Education (law nº 9.394/1996) and the Statute of the Child and Adolescent (law nº 8.069/1990). It is at this level of law that the right to education ceases to be merely a constitutional affirmation and begins to translate into organized duties of public authorities, with the definition of responsibilities, levels of education, and the guarantee of free and universal provision. This represents a structural inflection in the Brazilian Rule of Law.
The second layer brings together the laws that reorient meaning, memory, and content. They do not reorganize the administrative structure of the system, but intervene directly in its symbolic and formative horizon. This is the case of laws nº 10.639/2003 and nº 11.645/2008, which make the teaching of African, Afro-Brazilian, and Indigenous history and culture mandatory. This is not a cosmetic adjustment, but an epistemological inflection: by confronting the Eurocentric linearity that has shaped the school imaginary for decades, these laws reposition education as a policy of memory and identity. In this movement, Oswald de Andrade’s anthropophagic intuition is rediscovered: to critically metabolize our foundations, rather than uncritically importing models.
The third layer corresponds to regulatory and sector-specific laws, aimed at specific practices, offering modalities, pedagogical agendas, or forms of State communication with society. This group includes the regulation of distance education, through decree no. 12.456/2025 and MEC Ordinance no. 378/2025, the mandatory exhibition of national films in basic education (law no. 13.006/2014), the Inter-school Cultural Week (law no. 14.988/2024), and the National Policy for Simple Language itself (law no. 15.263/2025). These are laws that do not redefine the system as a whole, but qualify the daily journey, correct distortions, and respond to concrete demands of the present time.
Education, productivity and the global dispute
It is at the intersection between these layers — especially between those that reorient the meaning of education and those pressured by global efficiency agendas — that the debate on the influence of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on Brazilian educational policies returns. The seductive lexicon of vocational education suggests modernization, pragmatism, and alignment with the so-called “world of work”. Beneath this apparently neutral surface, a significant shift in the formative meaning of education is observed, especially in peripheral countries.
This shift directly dialogues with the distinction proposed by Marilena Chauí between the institutional university and the operational university. While the former is guided by the critical production of knowledge and broad training, the latter begins to operate according to criteria of performance, productivity, and measurement of results. As Barbara Freitag warns, this is a worldwide phenomenon, associated with the diffusion of managerial models and the financialization of public policies, and not a Brazilian particularity.
In this context, the OECD’s performance is consistent with its institutional mission, focused on economic efficiency and performance. This is a legitimate rationality within its field, although insufficient to encompass education in its broader formative sense. When transplanted without critical mediation, this logic can result, as Ivor Goodson warns, in a narrowing of social and educational expectations, by turning still immature choices into premature professional destinations.
Laws as a living practice
Read in this way, laws cease to be an indistinct burden and begin to function as tracks of guidance. Some define the terrain, others redraw the landscape, others indicate specific paths. Navigating this map requires attention and some technical vocabulary — a bit of legalese, it’s true —, but it also requires recognizing that this vocabulary should not be an obstacle to understanding.
It is precisely at this point that the National Policy on Simple Language becomes exemplary. Established in November 2025, it sets guidelines for public administration communication to be clear, accessible, and understandable, allowing citizens to find, understand, and use the information that structures their rights. By proposing direct sentences, textual organization, clarification of technical terms, and attention to accessibility, the law does not impoverish the law: it democratizes its reading and strengthens social participation.
By examining the laws that make up the normative landscape of education in this way, more than understanding them, it becomes possible to incorporate them as a living part of the educational profession — and, from them, to inspire the elaboration of new devices written with rigor, clarity, and public responsibility, capable of improving the instruments that shape school life and, consequently, the collective future of the nation.
Who wrote this column
Roberto Munhoz
