Introduction

Established in 2019, the National Civic-Military School Program (Programa Nacional das Escolas Cívico-Militares – PECIM) initiated the militarization of public schools as a measure to counter violence and improve the quality of basic education in Brazil. The program is aimed at providing military support to school administrative and teaching staffs. PECIM is presented on the Federal Government’s official website as an initiative by the Ministry of Education (MEC, for its acronym in Portuguese) in collaboration with the Ministry of Defense (MD) and key partners, namely: the Center for Management and Strategic Studies (Centro de Gestão e Estudos Estratégicos – CGEE), the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – CAPES), the Federal University of Goiás (Universidade Federal de Goiás – UFG), the National Institute for Educational Studies and Research (Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisas Educacionais – INEP), the Center for Personnel Studies and Fort Duque de Caxias (Centro de Estudos de Pessoal e Forte Duque de Caxias – CEP/FDC), and the Military Engineering Institute (Instituto Militar de Engenharia – IME).

In order to consolidate the program, Ordinance No. 2015 of November 20th, 2019, regulated certain actions, such as the salary of military personnel and other costs arising from the National Education Fund (Fundo Nacional de Educação – FNDE). The majority of servicemen assigned to militarized schools are Armed Forces reservists, while military policemen and firefighters are allowed to participate if a state or district government decision is rendered on the matter.

It is worth stressing that, despite defending the same values, Civic-Military Schools are different from Military Schools, which are regulated by different laws, norms, and educational objectives. We therefore refer in this text to Civic-Military Schools, since the discussion concerns specifically the schools that have joined the PECIM program, although the militarization of public schools has been an ongoing phenomenon in Brazil since the 1990s. Being a Federal Government program, PECIM further advances and amplifies this process.

^{Alves, Toschi & Ferreira (2018)} illustrate that in the state of Goiás, during the Marcone Perillo administrations (1999-2002; 2006-2011; and 2015-2018) and in the context of public security policies, military schools were created through bills proposed, according to the government, to meet the expectations of the population manifested by means of a petition (^{Alves; Toschi; Ferreira, 2018}).

The resolution regarding the militarization of Brazilian public schools through the PECIM program, according to Erasto Mendonça, is based on the fact that

[...] the supposed credibility and effectiveness of those schools, combined with strict disciplinary control and respect for the hierarchy, as well as the appreciation of civility, would be sufficient reasons to hand the management of public schools over to the military police force. Allied to these pretexts, the fight against violence and drug involvement also seems to populate the imagination of families as a good argument to support this government initiative. The potential advantages seem to cloud the vision of families who, as a way to compensate for it, in the various state-level experiences of militarization, end up accepting quotas for children of military personnel, admission processes, payment of monthly tuition fees, purchase of uniforms that are much more expensive than those usually worn in public schools, extremely harsh disciplinary norms, including the adoption of punishments that have long been banned in civilian schools, among other procedures typical of militarized schools, in addition to the interference of the public security sector in educational policies

(^{Mendonça, 2019b}, p. 595).

Besides those issues, one of the contentions with respect to Civic-Military Schools is their noncompliance with Article 206 of the Brazilian Constitution, which deals with equal conditions of access and permanence in school, as well as free education, liberty, and pluralism. They are also incompatible with the principles of the Education Guidelines and Basis Law (Leis de Diretrizes de Bases da Educação – LDB), by allowing managerial positions to be held by professionals from areas other than education, such as the military.

A school, by definition, is a collective environment where individuals meet for the purpose of teaching and learning. Therefore, “to refer to schools as a sociocultural field thus entails rescuing the role the subjects play in the social fabric that constitutes it as an institution” (^{Dayrell, 1996}, p. 136).

Brazil’s current public education model faces obstacles to the exercise of the right to education, such as the difficulties associated with student attendance until completion of basic education, since

[...] school evasion occurs for several reasons, from those directly related to the institution, such as the quality of teaching and the school environment, to social life, such as family issues and/or the environment in which the student lives

(^{Sales et al., 2019}, p. 1371).

In this sense it is worth investigating whether or not the militarization of public schools, as a government program materialized through PECIM, helps to solve the issues that preclude the right to education from being exercised. In this article, our choice to refer to “civic-military schools” as opposed to “militarized schools” is based on the criticism of the public school militarization process that is already taking place in the country, but now through a government program. As Erasto Fortes Mendonça warns (2019a, p. 624),

With the Federal Government’s initiative to create PECIM, the proposal of military schools in the capitals was altered to follow the model of state government initiatives, which have been spreading across the country, to militarize public schools, handing their management over to the corresponding military police forces, and in some cases military firefighters as well.

Thus, analyzing the conflicts associated with the government’s process of militarizing Brazilian public schools is a bioethical debate that seeks to comprehend the objectives of said moral conflicts, who exactly is interested in defending a conservative and military political agenda, and the potential consequences for public education, since, in the interaction between the school space and militarization, power manifests “in a triply qualified fashion and in a permanent articulation with the legal, military, and educational powers, demanding that the analysis reassess the prominence of students” (^{Brunetta, 2015}, p. 501).

School militarization is a debate that concerns society as a whole. Bioethics supports action-reflection on social conflicts of collective interest, as advocated by Fátima de ^{Oliveira (1997)}, according to whom there are two sides to bioethics – ethics and citizenship – the former as a discipline and a branch of science, and the latter as a social movement, as it is not limited to ethical challenges between patient and physician, being concerned with the power relations and other inequalities in different areas, such as Healthcare, Education, Politics, Environment, among others (^{Oliveira, 1997}).

The term “bioethics” was explained by Van Rensselaer Potter in 1971 as an environmental and global ethic that tackles in an interdisciplinary fashion several issues that permeate life and the transformations of nature-society. The author maintains those considerations aim to integrate aspects of both the natural and the human sciences through ethics, seeking to discuss collective challenges and conflicts (^{Potter, 2016}).

The adversities that pervade Education, in particular public education, are of bioethical interest. As per Freire’s pedagogy, Education relates to the subjects and autonomy, while representing the inseparable quality of school educational contents and the ethical education of students (^{Freire, 1996}). Considering that the ethical subject is built upon the relationship between subject and society, the school environment is where an important part of that construction takes place.

According to Volnei Garrafa, Intervention Bioethics “proposes a concrete alliance with the historically more fragile side of society” (^{Garrafa, 2005}, p. 128). Originated in Brazil, Intervention Bioethics seeks to understand ethical conflicts and has a theoretical-epistemological nature, adopting a non-colonizing perspective that can actually contribute to social transformation. It provides tools for the analysis of ethical disputes from a spatial and politicized perspective, understanding the non-neutrality of public policies and how they relate to social inequalities. In a more contextualized bioethical analysis, in order to support the discussion, our choice for Intervention Bioethics is based on the proposition that ethical-political conflicts should be analyzed and resolved by those who are part of the issue, thus fostering an analysis that is committed to reality in the fight against social injustice.

In the case of school militarization, it is crucial to understand how the autonomy and dignity of teachers, students, and other subjects are threatened by the promotion of Civic-Military Schools, as well as how important those issues are both on an individual and a collective level. Thus, this study seeks to analyze the militarization of public schools in the Federal District from an Intervention Bioethics perspective. To this end, an analysis was carried out of texts, articles, books, and official documents related to the subject in recent years (2019-2021). This particular time frame was chosen based on the political agenda – which includes school militarization – of both the federal and the district-level administrations that were in power then.

Soldier Ideology and the Coloniality of Life

In a broader sense, militarization is explained by Frei Betto as “a process whereby values, ways of life, principles, and norms that guide the military world are transferred to the public administration, militarizing the State” (^{Betto, 2021}, p. 2). Those values that uphold the militarization of the State are herein referred to as the Soldier Ideology.

Regarding those values as seen through the lens of Brazil’s political experience, we explicitly went through periods of military dictatorship, with the censorship of human rights, torture, and a series of violations directed at whomever thought, existed, and acted contrary to the norms, values, and political projects imposed by the military. In the words of Frei Betto, the dictatorship we experienced in Brazil intensified the objectification of people, since “the militarization of hearts and minds makes others invisible and despicable, thus justifying violence” (^{Betto, 2021}, p. 3).

This political violence is still legitimized by the lack of Transitional Justice in Brazil, i.e., not holding the military accountable for their crimes of torture and violence during the times of military dictatorship. In this sense, the popularization of urban militarization as a need for security to fight violence is in line with what Marcelo Lopes de Souza explains:

[...] since fear is a bad advisor, broad sectors of civil society, starting with mainstream media, are increasingly in favor of supporting, with ever fewer caveats, the explicit militarization of the urban issue. Whereas that was often reduced to a police matter in the past, it is now advancing in leaps and bounds towards being turned into a military matter in a fully institutionalized way

(^{Souza, 2008}, p. 127).

Faced with such a scenario of militarization of life and permanent insecurity, the term Soldier Ideology was coined by the authors of the present work as an attempt to understand the values, norms, and actions that constitute the military praxis and appear in the narratives concerning the Brazilian Civic-Military Schools. Those norms correspond to how one relates to subjects, institutions, and spaces.

The armed defense and offensive of National Security, as well as the discipline, violence, suffering, reason, development, and civility, are all examples of values upon which this ideology is built. In his studies on military ethics, ^{James Toner (1998, p. 49)} argues that

A major problem with ethics education is that it cannot be crammed into neat compartments and nice-sounding, desired learning outcomes. I wholly agree that there is a moral literature with which people ought to be familiar, and I completely agree that knowledge of certain religious, philosophical, historical, and literary sources can help us all find our way through the ethical jungle. But there is no ‘magic bullet’ – no always-certain ethical compass. We must teach moral reasoning, not just ‘core values’ or ‘ethical checklists’

(^{Toner, 1998}, p. 49).

A Eurocentric moral reasoning is central to military values. By adopting the posture of strongholds of reason, the military automatically opposes anyone who infringes upon the norms of their institutions and values, and to sustain those moralities, the use of force and violence – both symbolic and material – is permitted. This is the Soldier Ideology, which seeks to homogenize and control bodies, minds, relationships, emotions, and institutions, so that they serve and sustain the capitalist mode of production – which operates through a Eurocentric grammar by constituting a Sovereign State based on Coloniality (^{Quijano, 1992}). The social imagery therefore consists of colonial values. Those moralities occur at both global and regional scales in geopolitical and micropolitical processes. Thus, we will proceed to analyze the existing correlations between Soldier Ideology and the historical-political events that marked Latin America as whole, such as the European colonization of the Americas, and that constitute the foundations of colonial values.

Anibal Quijano’s concept of Coloniality of Power teaches that the category of race was established as the central idea to legitimize European power over other peoples during their 15^th-century colonization efforts (^{Quijano, 1992}). When we refer to colonial European values, which therefore are racist, as Rita Segato argues (^{Segato, 2018}), it becomes apparent that development and civility, as found in the Soldier Ideology, operate in accordance with a logic of exclusion and power, and define in their structure those that are hierarchically superior and endowed with reason, ethics, education, civility, and a series of predicates that the colonial system designates as exclusive to the white, heterosexual, bourgeois landlords. According to ^{Fanon (1968, p.30)}, the colonized world is Manichean, since

It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say with the help of the army and the police force, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil.

In light of the above, as we deal with militarization – in particular the militarization of Brazilian public schools – we need to understand its relationship with colonial-era State policies and the subjective and material intentions behind the dissemination of military values in schools.

At the national level, we can use the Escola Sem Partido (“School Without a Party”) political organization as an example of narrative that promotes the Soldier Ideology. Created in 2004 by lawyer Miguel Nagib, who announced his departure from the organization in 2020, thus exempting himself from any activities and publications, the organization promotes what its members classify as fighting ideological indoctrination. They argue that gender and religion issues, for example, should not be discussed in schools, but within the family. They accuse ideological indoctrination of being a left-wing practice and cast doubt on basic human rights. School Without a Party is also responsible for several bills advocating that teachers should not have teaching autonomy in different regions of Brazil, a constitutional right guaranteed by Article 206.

Whereas School Without a Party demands a nonideological education, its narrative comprises political and ideological disputes. Through an impossible political neutrality rhetoric – which is also undesirable in a democratic regime, since politics is its existential foundation – it promotes the strengthening of colonial modernity, in which developmentalist policy-making and neoliberal economics are neutral political stands, concealing the universal and hegemonic under an invisibility cloak while depoliticizing the debate and thus removing any plurality of ideas, moralities, and pedagogies from the public scene.

Civic-Military Schools are in consonance with a political agenda that opposes ideological indoctrination, as seen in the statements made by former Minister of Education Abraham Weintraub¹ (2019-2020) at the launch of the Civic-Military Schools Program, for example: “If you attended a civic-military school, you are right-wing,” and that “civic-military schools are a proposition to ensure that this green-and-yellow flag will never be red” (^{Palhares, 2020}).

In such a tumultuous scenario around the right to education in Brazil and its intricacies, we witnessed the State defending a teaching model that is not based on freedom and the basic civil rights of a country’s political life– a context characterized by the school militarization project, the PECIM program, and its pretext of development, civility, and reason, which has been implementing the Soldier Ideology in the school environment as a guiding and disciplinary principle.

In defense of developmentalism as a principle, the relationship between the State program and a colonizing discourse is evident, when the notion of development is related to order, standardization, and control of dissent, divergences, and diversities, objectively and subjectively strengthening the colonial vein of the State, as Flor do Nascimento explains:

One of the characteristics of coloniality is to consider the structuring of reality in terms of hierarchies, according to which those who are constituted as less developed must be under the tutelage only of those who are supposedly more developed, although development itself is somehow associated with that tutelage. The different ways of life in central and peripheral countries not only imply a difference in the level of development, but also a grading of values between individual lives

(^{Flor do Nascimento, 2010}, p. 112).

Militarization and Soldier Ideology are threats to the human right to education and to Brazilian public schools, posing a threat to the plurality of existences and representing acts of State violence comprised in the Coloniality of Life, which can be understood as

[...] the process of creating an ontology of life that authorizes thinking that some lives are more important than others, from a political point of view, thus founding a hierarchy and a justification for domination, exploitation, and submission under the pretext of this being a path towards the development of less developed lives

(^{Flor do Nascimento; Garrafa, 2011}, p. 292).

School militarization is a strategy for the domination of bodies and minds as an attempt to standardize subjects and promote the interests of the Soldier Ideology. It is worth mentioning that school militarization is implemented in public schools, thus targeting Brazil’s peripheral and poor populations, since the elite has access to private education. It was actually representatives from private schools that substantiated and bolstered School Without a Party while guiding the recent secondary education curriculum restructuring process in Brazil, which removed from public education the mandatory character of school subjects such as history, philosophy, sociology, and arts – a decision made without the participation of universities, professors, researchers, schools, administrators, and students.

Brazil’s school militarization processes, despite being part of the Federal Government’s program, included different procedures, depending on the region where they were implemented. The multiple experiences of Civic-Military Schools in Brazil evince the same issues seen in public policies based on colonial/racist views. This regulation of life is the grammar to be followed, under the pretext of reducing violence and preserving the good customs; the violence of the Brazilian State has thus been exposed. In this study, we will further investigate the experience of school militarization in our region, the Federal District.

Shared Management and Militarization as a State Solution

In the Federal District, aside from participating in the Federal Government’s PECIM program, Governor Ibaneis Rocha created Joint Ordinance No. 01 of January 31^st, 2019, which deals with the implementation of the “Shared Management School” pilot project, a partnership between

The State Department of Education and the State Department of Public Security, through joint actions to provide quality education, as well as to build strategies aimed at community policing and dealing with violence in the school environment, and to promote a culture of peace and the full exercise of citizenship

(^{Distrito Federal, 2019}).

This pilot project of shared management between Education and Public Security was implemented in 2019 in four local schools: Education Center 03 Sobradinho; Education Center 308 Recanto das Emas; Education Center 01 Estrutural; and Education Center 07 Ceilândia. These schools were chosen due to their adherence and because they met the criteria set forth in Art. 1, Paragraph 1 of the aforementioned joint ordinance, which selects schools based on social vulnerability, crime rates, human development, and basic education. Article 2 qualifies the Shared Management objectives:

I – Promoting civic and patriotic values for students of the teaching units; II - Training students with the aim of preparing them to exercise their full citizenship, being aware of their duties and rights, in compliance with the guarantees provided for in Art. 53 of the Statute of the Child and Adolescent and in Arts. 32 and 35 of Law No. 9.394/96, which establishes educational guidelines and bases nationwide; III - Improving basic education development indicators (IDEB) in the teaching institutions that are covered; IV - Seeking higher approval rates for public school students in the admission exams to secondary and higher education institutions, as well as greater insertion into the workforce; V – Advancing towards meeting the parameters of citizen public safety in the school community through the integrated participation of society and public entities as a transforming tool in teaching management; VI - Reducing school evasion

(^{Distrito Federal, 2019}).

Twelve public schools in the Federal District participate in the Shared Management project. According to data from the official website, Civic-Military Schools were implemented in nine of them. As a basic education policy, roughly 16,000 students are covered by the project. The Federal District Government planned to institute shared management in 40 schools by the end of 2022 (^{Brazil, 2019}). Information was also made available on the website claiming that education professionals are exclusively responsible for teaching, while security professionals are responsible for student discipline, seeking “strategies aimed at community policing and dealing with violence in the school environment, as shared management aims to promote a culture of peace and the full exercise of citizenship” (^{Brazil, 2019}). In general, from the point of view of the teachers’ union, according to ^{Mendonça (2019b, p. 609)}

The process is seen as a juggling act to take the focus off the real education issues, which range from lack of proper investments to lack of a sufficiently sized pedagogical team to deal with school matters. On the contrary, violence is spectacularized as a pretext for admitting police officers into schools, in a rushed manner and without prior debate with the education community and society as whole, which leads the population to believe that school militarization is the solution to the daily insecurity to which it is subjected, not considering that violence is structural in society, and that schools are just a reflection of the society in which they are inserted.

The experience of Shared Management in different schools in 2019 revealed similar problems that denounce the structures of modern-colonial society. In June 2019, at Education Center 03 Sobradinho, reports of sexual abuse by a Military Police sergeant made the headlines in local and national media (^{Cassela; Marques, 2019}). At the time, District Education Secretary Rafael Parente stated on social media that the sergeant had been dismissed. In the second half of the same year, at Education Center 07 Ceilândia, another Military Police sergeant disavowed a teacher inside the classroom, and voice notes were recorded during the altercation (^{Caputo, 2019}). At that same school, a Military Police officer immobilized a student who had gotten into a fight with another classmate; videos were taken by students and posted on social media (^{Dutra, 2019}). Three situations that add to many other violations of teacher liberty, autonomy, respect for schools as public spaces, and the dignity of the school community. It is noteworthy that the experiences of the Shared Management pilot project took place in peripheral Administrative Regions of the Federal District.

Presence of the Soldier Ideology in more vulnerable regions demonstrates the State’s decision to develop those regions while indicating where the use of public security forces within schools is allowed, or even ethically acceptable, interfering directly and indirectly in the pedagogical processes. The chosen location of the schools to be militarized is part of that State policy.

A consultant for the Legislative Chamber of the Federal District, Gabriela Tunes Silva, produced a study titled The militarization of Public Schools: An Analysis of School Performance, Discipline, Safety and Legal Aspects, which addresses important questions regarding Civic-Military Schools in the Federal District.

There is a lack of conclusive evidence that strict rules actually improve student behavior and discipline, so the argument that “military discipline improves student performance” may also be a false claim, given that the best performance of military schools is due to the fact that they select, in several ways, the best students. Strict discipline, which includes suspensions and expulsions, can even act as a mechanism for excluding students within different learning and socialization contexts, precisely those who need the school environment the most in order to achieve full cognitive, social, cultural, and affective development

(^{Silva, 2019}, p. 9).

In the conclusions of the study, Gabriela Tunes reflects on

[...] the need for at least some level of caution when carrying out the militarization of public schools, on the grounds that they will bring benefits to the school, students, and communities. [...] In short, there are certainly less risky and authoritarian ways to achieve improvements in the quality of education in public schools that do not involve the possibility of causing so much damage to students, teachers, and the school community

(^{Silva, 2019}, p. 21).

The consequences for students, education professionals, and the community are observed in the intensification of inequities sustained by society’s colonial power structure. Thus, questions regarding race, sexuality, such as gender identity and sexual orientation, as well as behaviors and existences that are not part of the colonial pattern, are censored in this militarized school model. In Militarization, violence, and racism: two sides of the same coin, ^{Wanderson Flor do Nascimento (2019, p. 4)} professes that

The image of the criminal that populates common imagination is a young black male. The same image that had been created around the laboring enslaved people during the slavery period. A precarious and contradictorily disposable life. Crucial to maintain enslaved labor, but disposable at any time when productivity, colonial order, and the desire for death are in question.

These curtailments of existences, identities, behaviors, and expressions in the school environment – which school militarization promotes – show that, contrary to Paulo Freire’s proposal of an education for liberation (^{Freire, 1999}), with school militarization we are going up against the very grain of autonomy, dignity, and plurality. By standardizing, and therefore homogenizing subjects, militarization disconnects them from their realities, thus reinforcing the power and violence of the State to control epistemologies, affections, joys, and the multiple dimensions of living and of potentially living well (^{Acosta, 2019}). It is a public policy that establishes enmity policies among all actors in the school environment. Philosopher ^{Achille Mbembe (2017)} explains that enmity policies are propagated and materialized in the State’s colonial-modern policies by establishing who may and who may not live, which he calls necropolitics. Racism is what regulates those deaths. In a necropower operation,

The city of the colonized, the indigenous, the black, the Arab quarter, is a place of bad reputation, populated by men of equally bad reputation. There, one is born anywhere, in any way. People die anywhere, while the causes are unknown. A world without pauses, where men are stacked one on top of the other and the huts are laid out in the same fashion. The city of the colonized starves due to lack of bread, meat, shoes, coal, light. A squatting, kneeling, and wallowing place. It is a city of blacks, of ruminants [...]

(^{Mbembe, 2017}, p. 131).

School militarization colonizes the teaching and learning processes through the lens of the disciplinary power of the military over the school community. It cannot be argued that the disciplinary does not affect the pedagogical, for they are inseparable processes, since the identities of the subjects are plural and part of how the teaching and learning processes are produced and dialogue with reality.

An Analysis Based on Intervention Bioethics

The ethical conflict over school militarization is expressed in several State actions that violate the rights related to education and the plurality of subjects, such as the experiences discussed in this article. As such, Bioethics, as a field of study and action, seeks to problematize and publicize the issues that occur in scientific research, medical techniques, technological development, and potential relationships with human rights and the rights of other beings, among others. Bioethics can also be said to be concerned with the power relations of subjects-subjects, subjects-institutions, and subjects-societies.

^{Beauchamp and Childress (1994)} are important authors who shape Anglo-Saxon Bioethics and stipulate guiding principles for actions that require problematization and ethical resolution. However, the principles of Anglo-Saxon Bioethics, which are spread globally and produced in the Northern Hemisphere, are insufficient to analyze issues that occur in other locations because, in addition to the context of social inequality experienced in several countries that were colonized in the Southern Hemisphere, which have not yet been resolved, Principlist Bioethics limits the scope of action of the bioethical field to clinical bioethics and depoliticizes the necessary debate on the ethics of life in light of the public issues that we experience as a society. In this sense, Intervention Bioethics stresses the need to incorporate political issues and situations into the field of bioethics, not ignoring the importance of overcoming the “acute social and economic discrepancies that exist between rich and poor, between the nations of the North and the South” (^{Garrafa, 2005}).

Intervention Bioethics establishes that, given the emerging and persistent bioethical situations, it is necessary to analyze the dangers posed by moral imperialism in a globalized world – an imperialism that can be observed from the colonization era up until the spatial organization of the modern Western world. When analyzing school militarization through the lens of Intervention Bioethics, it is possible to understand that the power relations are disproportionate between the public security apparatus and the school community. In addition to its unconstitutionality, school militarization creates obstacles to the exercise of the right to education by violating people’s rights. In other words, school militarization was implemented in an imposing way without any dialogue with the school community, which goes against the principles of formulation and implementation of any good public policy.

When choosing principles that relate to our reality, Intervention Bioethics argues that the 4Ps – Prudence, Prevention, Precaution, and Protection – in addition to critical solidarity and social responsibility, are fundamental to support ethical practices (^{Selli; Garrafa, 2006}).

With regard to the 4Ps of Intervention Bioethics, in relation to our analysis of school militarization, it is possible to understand that there is no prudence when seeking discipline through the use of force. This demonstrates that prevention does not occur, since it focuses on preventing the occurrence of conflicts while failing to resolve them in a purely disciplinary manner. Armed security in schools is an attempt at conflict resolution through discipline, not dialogue, which can cautiously prevent those disputes. Therefore, no protection is provided to those who find themselves in disproportionate power relations within the school environment; on the contrary, what happens is a reinforcement of power relations that seeks to punish those who lie outside of the norm (^{Selli; Garrafa, 2006}).

All relationships established within the school environment are pedagogical, from classes taught in an indoor setting on various subjects, such as language, geography, and philosophy, as well as during breaks between classes, meal breaks, and other activities. Those interactions that take place in school grounds have their specificities and also their own teaching-learning processes. They are unique to everyday life and to the relationships that take place in schools. The standardization that school militarization proposes based on a thesis of development, reason, and universality confronts the plurality of existence and thus fosters the narrative around marginalized individuals not needing rights simply for being different in a modern society that is racist, as Mbembe points out, “people who, in order to live, must always be aware of death” (^{Mbembe, 2017}, p. 45).

Final Considerations

While claiming to provide quality education and reduce violence, school militarization as a government program works towards propagating military values, which in turn are founded upon colonial values. It is also a threat that crushes the autonomy and dignity of any educator or student who disagrees with the Soldier Ideology – focused on morality, reason, discipline, and development, which are essentially colonial values.

The Brazilian State criminalizes different locations from a colonial perspective of spatial planning by militarizing some schools based on violence rates, when the violence that school militarization is supposed to fight is a consequence of the social structure, i.e., it is not unique to the school environment. As such, in addition to the dangers and threats to the exercise of the right to education posed by social militarization, which violates several different regulations, guidelines, and principles of public education, the proposal of a policing that seeks to discipline students is presented as a violent action focused on promoting peace. This violent action is portrayed symbolically and materially through the standardization of people. Colonial violence is necessary for the functioning of the current capitalist modes of production, fostering liberal and neoliberal ideologies. According to ^{Mbembe (2017, p. 87)}, liberal democracies such as Brazil reveal that “almost all [democracies] nowadays appeal to a bellicose fervor, often to mend the old nationalist fabric” (emphasis added).

In order to enforce the right to education, it must be guaranteed for the largest possible number of subjects, regardless of their values and beliefs. Those individuals have their rights assured by the Constitution in order to access high-quality, free, and public education. The colonial values and violence that foment school militarization reveal that, in addition to breaching the Constitution and other regulations, the control of subaltern populations by the State is part of the necropolitics of the modern State, which chooses who lives and who dies, who has the right to education, and who has no value for this system. This choice is regulated by State racism. As witnessed in the fight against violence in the school environment and the disciplining of students for life through the process of school militarization, the State demonstrates that the State itself is violent, as it insists on remaining a colonizing power.