Education
Innovation
September 10, 2025
Historiographical revisionism and teacher training: the risk of ideological distortion
Memory laws assume a pedagogical and social role by fostering a more faithful understanding of Brazil’s historical and cultural formation
Reviewing the past is a condition of historical science itself. History is not a crystallized monument, but a field in constant reworking, which reopens as new sources emerge, new methods consolidate, and new questions are asked. Revisionism, when conducted under scientific parameters, plays an essential epistemological role: it ensures that collective memory does not degrade into dogma, but remains in dialogue with the present.
It is fundamental, however, to distinguish revisionism from denial. Revising means re-evaluating evidence, confronting hypotheses, and proposing new interpretations based on verifiable data. Denying, on the contrary, is refusing established facts for ideological reasons, as in the case of those who relativize slavery, genocides, or dictatorships. The former is essential for the advancement of knowledge; the latter, a social disservice.
The historicity of knowledge reminds us that archives open, technologies improve, and new theoretical frameworks illuminate previously invisible dimensions. Advances such as DNA analysis, digital archaeology, or big data allow us to reconstruct human trajectories with unprecedented precision.
Business Intelligence (BI) tools, already common in public management, have also spread to education and are widely used to track school attendance, performance in regular assessments, and fulfillment of curricular goals. These systems help identify bottlenecks and guide public policies, but they do not replace the affective and relational dimension of educational practice. Teaching goes beyond metrics: it depends on listening, connection, and sensitivity that only human interaction provides.
This point is central, because the school curriculum tends to adopt a utilitarian bias, focused on pragmatic and measurable results. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu already recalled that, in this movement, symbolic violence is reproduced.
Ivor Goodson, a British educator, reinforces this perspective by showing that the curriculum is always a social and political construction, shaped by power struggles and the intentional selection of memories. Thus, the use of digital tools such as BI, although useful for managing educational systems, needs to be viewed in its critical dimension, as indicators and metrics also participate in this dispute over what should or should not be taught.
Even under the logic of efficiency, historiographical revisionism proves strategic: it corrects distortions, enhances the institutional understanding and offers subsidies for the formulation of social policies aimed at building balanced and secure communities.
From a pedagogical point of view, the legitimacy of revisionism is manifested in decisive examples: the Roman economy, interpreted by Moses Finley as essentially stagnant, is being re-evaluated by authors such as Walter Scheidel, Peter Temin, and Neville Morley, who describe it as complex and integrated; the heroic narrative of the “discovery of America” is being deconstructed in favor of accounts that highlight indigenous protagonists and colonial violence; slavery is revisited with new readings that incorporate cultural and subjective dimensions previously neglected.
The same principle applies to other fields of history, in which well-founded revisions broaden understanding and bring research closer to the multiple social experiences that constitute the past. In all these cases, it is not a matter of inventing, but of updating understanding in light of the evidence.
Interpretive limits
Reviewing Brazilian history also involves re-evaluating consolidated narratives . The Brazilian Historical and Geographical Institute (IHGB), created in 1838, played a relevant role in building a national identity, but recent research has shown that its approach favored certain cultural references over others. Studies such as those by Isadora Maleval (2020) and Luís Roberto Manhani (2023) analyzed IHGB minutes and speeches in the 19th century, highlighting both its political role in cohesion and its interpretive limitations regarding Black and Indigenous populations.
In the field of gender studies, works such as the classic “Women without history,” by Maria Odila Dias (1983), and the more recent research by Maria da Glória de Oliveira have shown how female intellectual production has been historically little recognized.
In this debate, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s (2002) conceptual contribution is useful: the so-called intersectional effects describe situations in which different social markers—such as gender, race, and class—act in a combined way, generating specific patternsof exclusion that cannot be explained in isolation. This theoretical formulation has been incorporated by historiography to offer more consistent analytical frameworks, especially in the study of the experiences of Black and Indigenous women.
Faced with these examples, scientific revisionism does not eliminate the existing tradition, but complements it, allowing for a broad understanding of the formation of Brazilian society. In this context, memory laws such as nº 10.639/2003 and nº 11.645/2008 assume an invaluable pedagogical and social role.
The first made the teaching of Afro-Brazilian and African history and culture mandatory, correcting centuries of neglect. The second broadened the scope by including indigenous history and culture, recognizing that without the perspective of the original peoples, there is no realistic understanding of Brazil.
Its importance grows even more for having altered the Law of Directives and Bases of National Education (Law nº 9.394/1996), permanently inserting into the core of the educational system the requirement for a more faithful understanding of Brazil’s historical and cultural formation. These laws exemplify a continuous process that needs to be maintained, at the risk of inadvertently losing sight of who we are as a society.
An expressive example of this movement is the work “The Land of 1000 Peoples”, by the indigenous Tapuia writer Kaká Werá Jecupé. By narrating the history of Brazil from the perspective of the original peoples, the author breaks with the Eurocentric bias and reinserts into national memory the plurality of cultures that has always existed in this territory.
Your proposal reveals that Brazil has never been homogeneous: it is, in fact, the land of more than a thousand peoples, each with its own cosmologies, languages, and traditions, which, by historically intertwining with Africans, Europeans, Asians, and Arabs, shape the identity of a single people, multiple in its essence and inseparable in its totality.
Teacher narratives
Each professor, in their initial or continuing education, exercises a daily “historical revisionism”. Ivor Goodson recalls that teachers’ narratives have a central role in shaping the real curriculum — the one that is effectively implemented in the classroom, beyond official prescriptions. It is in this narrative space that educators can embrace new historiographical perspectives and transform the school into a place of active memory.
This opening is characteristic of the teaching profession and directly connects to the principles of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), as expressed in the Statute of Racial Equality, federal law no. 12.288/2010. Studying these principles and applying them seriously is an urgent task to regenerate fissures in the social fabric.
The pedagogical guidelines of the São Paulo Municipal Secretariat of Education, expressed in the “Curriculum of the City”, exemplify the point of view that must be adopted by the educator: “There are still many misconceptions. There are facts about indigenous people that have never been taught honestly. Only very recently have we been gaining ground to tell the story from our perspective and under a particular worldview. One cannot think that our history follows the same path as Western history. And this is another knot that needs to be untangled” (São Paulo (SP) – Municipal Secretariat of Education – Pedagogical Coordination, 2023, p. 16).
And this is not an exclusive mission for history, Portuguese language, or arts teachers. The multiethenic and multicultural content can — and should — cross all areas of knowledge: in biology, through the study of genetics, which explains the biophysical characteristics of individuals; in mathematics, through the logic of ancestral games like mancala; in geography, through the richness and diversity of the African continent and the Atlantic Forest; in agricultural sciences, through the sustainable processes of coivaras and indigenous green gardens.
There is an abundance of examples that can inspire creative and inclusive lesson plans. What is often lacking is simply information or initiative. Scientific revisionism is, therefore, an exercise in historical consciousness detached from biases and committed to collective clarification. And it is precisely in education that it finds space to be realized rigorously, preparing society to deal with its issues, whatever they may be.
Memory laws are not based on opinions, but on long and representative public debates , in which different sectors of society are heard. They are based on scientific evidence , such as new historiographical benchmarks and documentary archaeology, and were approved as constitutional norms.
Once regulated by the MEC, they began to guide the updating of curricula, offering a basis for educational practices. This is the meeting point between law and practice: it is up to school management and the teaching staff to transform such norms into living practice, making the classroom a space for the critical exercise of memory and the reconstruction of a people’s historical trajectory, capable of recognizing and welcoming its diversity — a duty that transcends the law and belongs to the field of authentic education, the kind that goes beyond content and rules to seek the integral, critical, and ethical formation of each student.
Who wrote this column
Roberto Munhoz
