Sociology of Education and Marxism in Brazil

It is argued in this paper that the effect of the Marxist thought on Brazilian education was a process heavily determined by a peculiar set of historic circumstances. The main context was the struggle against the military dictatorship and in favour of the democratisation of society, conditioning both educational literature and educators’ organisation. The educational literature has a wide thematic range and is characterised by heterogeneity concerning the actual contributions to the explanation of Brazilian educational reality and the patterns of incorporation of Marxist sources. After this golden age of the Marxist paradigm the influence of Marxist studies has dramatically declined. Nowadays, this influence can be of two kinds: (i) a diffuse and non-exclusive one informing general reflections on a wide spectrum of educational studies; (ii) a specific set of educational studies on themes directly related to the core of the Marxist theory.