A educação potiguar em tempos de ditadura militar (1964-1985): A importância pedagógica de compreender a história da educação

Abstract

This article intends to highlight the importance of sites of memory, permanent or not, for the study of the fields of History of Education and History Teaching in the development of student and teacher knowledge that seeks to develop a socio-historical awareness, which understands the impacts of the past on the present. This paper aims to look back at the history of education during the period in which Brazil was under a constant violation of human rights due to a military dictatorial regime between 1964 and 1985. During the years of repression, education was summarily attacked by Institutional Acts, Laws, and Decrees signed by the dictators who sought to extinguish any possibility of ideas/critical thinking that contradicted current deological hegemony, affecting teachers as well as students with political persecution. Two people who suffered this persecution were Emmanuel Bezerra (Social Sciences) and José Silton Pinheiro (Pedagogy), two students and activists in the university student movement at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, were murdered by the Brazilian state. It was only in December of 2024 that they received a post-mortem graduation recognition. To that end, we will use as a foundation the concept of individual and collective memory (Halbwachs, 1990), employing as a learning resource the public history through interviews (Santhiago, 2021), and the use of oral sources (Portelli, 2016). It was possible to observe that the absence of existing sites of memory with a pedagogical purpose hinders the population's ability to understand the severity of the dictatorial regime, feeding conservative discourses that overlook the fragility of Brazilian democracy.