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UNESCO participates in a high-level meeting to discuss policies to protect the school environment in Brazil
This Tuesday (18 April), the Director and Representative of UNESCO in Brazil, Marlova Jovchelovitch Noleto, participated in a meeting convened by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to discuss protection policies for the school environment in response to threats and attacks that have recently occurred in the country. The meeting happened at the Planalto Palace, in Brasília, with the heads of the Judiciary and Legislative Powers, ministers, representatives of the Public Ministry, governors, mayors, and parliamentarians.
The purpose of the meeting was to discuss actions to combat the escalation of violent attacks on schools in Brazil, such as the one that occurred two weeks ago at a daycare centre in Blumenau (Santa Catarina state), which killed four children and injured five others. As part of a series of actions to prevent school violence, the Federal Government announced an investment of R$3 billion to be transferred to the Brazilian states and municipalities.
According to the Director and Representative of UNESCO in Brazil, the theme of the meeting convened by the President of the Republic is extremely important. It aligns with the Organization's mandate to build a culture of peace in the school environment, aiming to prevent all forms of violence, including hate speech, disseminated through digital networks. During the meeting, the urgent need to create guidelines and regulations for these platforms was recurrent in the President's and the ministers' addresses.
President Lula stated in his speech that guaranteeing peace in the school environment should not be done only with security measures:
We will not transform our schools into a maximum-security prison, which has no solution. There is no money for that, nor is it politically correct, humanly correct, or socially correct. If we try to do this, we are demonstrating that we are not good for much because we do not know how to solve this real severe problem.
In addition to the attack on the daycare centre in Blumenau, the tragic death of teacher Elisabeth Tenreiro, in São Paulo, which occurred days before, in addition to other threats disseminated across the country, ended up exposing the urgent need for joint actions so that these essential spaces for training, learning and socialization are not terrorized by hatred and violence.
For the Director and Representative of UNESCO in Brazil, it is necessary to work on respecting diversity, encouraging tolerance, and valuing and training teachers to have comprehensive and integrated prevention programmes. Furthermore, UNESCO, the lead agency of the United Nations for implementing the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 – which seeks to ensure quality inclusive education for all – advocates building a culture of peace in the school environment.
It is important to clarify that repressive measures and the use of police force will not be decisive in reducing violence in schools. Instead, we must work together to build a healthy environment and a culture of peace in the school and surrounding areas. For this, it is necessary to establish a healthy environment where students, children, adolescents, and young people feel welcomed and respected; and to train teachers to build a culture of peace that can detect possible threats in advance.
