Drilling Obedience: Civic-Military Schools in Brazil

The current school, whether confessional or governmental,

is the systematization of violence.

Adelino de Pinho, Revista A Vida, 1915

The school is premised on educating people for a form of coexistence classified as healthy within society. To this end, it becomes necessary to teach students to govern themselves, beginning with the internalization of rules that must be taught, transmitted, cultivated, and communicated to them. First, through moral values that vary according to the historical period. Then, through techniques of training, content learning, memorization, time management, planning, projects, assessments, and continuous examinations to which they are subjected. The mechanism of this technology of power directly affects each person’s body and conduct, in which discipline remains fundamental to the production of normal, disciplined, and obedient subjects, under the conditions required by contemporary society.

The school, as a social institution, is a disciplinary space, a space of confinement and control. Like the hospital, the factory, and the prison, with their rigid rules and methods of correction, it operates through enclosure. It does so through closed spaces for the social body, characteristic of disciplinary society (Foucault, 1987), marked by walls and by the ideal of recovering and/or forming individuals. It acts as a space for the production of knowledge through discipline and surveillance, which are transformed into essential tools of routine pedagogical practice by instituting the notion that one may be watched and “caught” at any moment.

“The school forms, formats, and grants graduation” (Passetti and Augusto, 2008, p. 80). To this end, it invests in the organization of space in order to ensure order, discipline, and control, producing knowledge that surveys and scrutinizes students down to the smallest detail. Through observations, inspections, notes, and records, it feeds a systematic classification in which possible skills, capacities, and deviations are dissected. This produces, on the one hand, discrimination, labels, and stigmas; and, on the other, hierarchical respect, obedience, and reward.

The so-called school environment was conceived, produced, and managed to shape people’s conduct, to turn children and youth into future conforming citizens, defenders of order, perhaps even potential citizen-police (Augusto, 2013) who produce, consume, denounce, surveil, control, and participate, whether through Associações de Pais e Mestres (APM, Parent-Teacher Associations) (Todos pela Educação, n.d.), the Programa Mães Guardiãs (Guardian Mothers Program) (São Paulo, 2026), or the Programa Bolsa do Povo Educação (Bolsa do Povo Education Program) (G1, 2023), among others.

To achieve this, it is essential to internalize discipline, exercises of subordination that shape proper behavior, and a life project based on rectitude, through which one learns one’s “proper place,” inaction, denunciation, and consent as pillars of participation and conservative adherence, so that, soon enough, one’s human capital may turn them into leaders, managers, successful and well-accomplished entrepreneurs. The deviant and inadequate, in turn, are left at the mercy of punishments and penalties, punished with exclusion or simply banned, since, according to this logic of moral conduct, they are doomed to be the losers. Yet, before banishment, they are branded as delinquents, vagrants, bad elements who provoke school violence – their improper behavior is a bad example that should not be followed, but that can be corrected through disciplinarization.

For some time now, spaces of confinement, such as the school, have moved beyond their walls. In the face of control society, discipline, norms, rules, and control itself operate in other spheres, and school education is also computational-informational insofar as it spreads through digital media, with synchronous or asynchronous remote classes that must be interactive in order to generate student engagement, as well as a range of learning activities interconnected with digital platforms, artificial intelligence, and robotics, to compose a digital culture and citizenship.

Today, surveillance and control take place through monitoring in rapid flows. Even so, the school is unable to put an end to so-called indiscipline and disobedience, which must be strategically identified and solved according to the knowledge of education specialists. It would be necessary to invest in management, mediation, and reception as responses to the vulnerability of the school community, territorial vulnerability, and socioeconomic vulnerability.

If the school continues to be questioned, if one speaks of school reform and school crisis, such discourses foster the amplification of civic-military education as a way to stem indiscipline. Indiscipline inside and even outside school remains an evil to be combated by the school community, since its effects are considered harmful to society, wearing down relations between teacher and student and among students themselves, producing disinterest in studying and, subsequently, school dropout.

The Imaginary of a Moral Crusade

The justifications invoked for civic-military schools are constitutive of practices and discourses that gained visibility when referring to the restoration of order in schools through the increase and support proper to military discipline, since hierarchy and discipline are considered the sustaining pillars of military institutions – the armed forces and the military police – and principles that must be respected and maintained in any context or situation. With regard to hierarchy, there is an apparatus in relations of ordering authority, respect, and obedience that is reflected in the required behavior, such as posture, gestures, vocabulary, clothing, haircut, and so on. This composes a hierarchical and disciplinary classification, through which one distinguishes oneself from others, constituting a military identity and a sense of belonging.

It is no coincidence that one of the arguments for implementing civic-military schools lies precisely in recovering public schools, from their infrastructure, equipment, and maintenance to school management policy, teaching, and learning, aiming at correcting the student body through the institutionalization of rigid hierarchical standards and norms modeled on military conduct. If we take, for example, the questions channel on the Programa Escola Cívico-Militar (“Civic-Military School Program”) of the State of São Paulo, we read that the program “proposes a model of school management of excellence directed at schools with low IDEB scores (Índice de Desenvolvimento da Educação Básica, “Basic Education Development Index”) and students in situations of social vulnerability (São Paulo, n.d.), allocating security as the ultimate objective, whether in relation to “delinquents” or to “the vulnerable.”

Imposition! The mirroring of military hierarchy and discipline in public schools, for many people, carries the hope of “fixing” and “straightening out” deviant children and youth, potential delinquents, the unwanted, the maladjusted; in other words, the abnormal must be framed within a circuit of ordering authority, for only then would they learn to govern themselves and become citizens of good standing.

However, the military school has existed in Brazil since the nineteenth century (Ferreira and Santos, 2025). The first military school was established in 1889 by Dom Pedro II: the Colégio Militar da Côrte (“Military College of the Court”). Initially, it served the orphans and children of military personnel from the Paraguayan War, providing assistance to military families. With the Proclamation of the Republic, its name was changed, becoming the Colégio Militar do Rio de Janeiro (“Military College of Rio de Janeiro”). For a century, its student body was strictly male; later, it began accepting girls. Its triad consists of technical subjects, patriotism, and discipline, forming the basis of the Sistema Colégio Militar do Brasil (“Military College System of Brazil”) (DEPA, 2025).

Civic-military schools are anchored in remnants of authoritarianism that remain present. During the Vargas Era (1930–1945), education ceased to be a regional issue and became a strategic pillar of the federal government. Under the justification of modernizing the country, the State took charge of education by establishing a ministry dedicated to the subject and implementing reforms that structured everything from basic to higher education. The objective was to prepare the labor force for growing industrialization and, at the same time, to use the classroom as a space of control and discipline¹.

When the Ministry of Education and Health was implemented, its purpose was to establish a curriculum that exalted nationalism and so-called civic values. To form the citizen of good standing, it was necessary to ensure the education and health of children and youth. Thus, the school would function as a mechanism of social control and technical qualification, consolidating a system aimed at integrating the citizen into the national development project.

During the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship (1964–1985), public education expanded, and the Ministry of Education invested in structural reforms. Through Law 5.692/71, the former primary and lower secondary levels were unified into the “1st Level” (eight years), and the “2nd Level” (three years) was created. The major change was compulsory professionalization: every secondary-level student was required to take vocational technical education, aiming to transform education into a tool for training labor for the market.

In the curricular and social fields, the period replaced reflective subjects such as Philosophy and Sociology with doctrinal contents such as Social Studies, Moral and Civic Education, and Brazilian Social and Political Organization (OSPB). In addition, it implemented the Brazilian Literacy Movement (MOBRAL), a youth and adult literacy program whose objective was to eradicate illiteracy in Brazil in the short term, but through a specific approach: teaching only the basics needed to read instructions, sign one’s name, and perform simple calculations – a functional literacy to the detriment of the methods created by Paulo Freire.

Beyond measures of broad schooling as training, the MEC stimulated intense persecution, imprisonment, torture, and exile of teachers and students considered subversive. These actions consolidated an educational model oriented toward the formation of labor power, but also based on fear and silencing, prioritizing the production of civil obedience.

With the redemocratization process, the school became a social right guaranteed by the Federal Constitution (1988), democratically destined for all, according to the following articles:

Art. 205. Education, a right of all and a duty of the State and the family, shall be promoted and encouraged with the collaboration of society, aiming at the full development of the person, their preparation for the exercise of citizenship, and their qualification for work. Art. 206. Teaching shall be provided on the basis of the following principles: I – equality of conditions for access to and permanence in school (Brazil, 1988 – emphasis added).

Subsequently, the 1996 Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da Educação Nacional (LDB, “Law of Guidelines and Bases of National Education”) came into force (Brazil, 1996), establishing the principles of freedom of teaching, learning, and research; pluralism of ideas; equality of conditions; ethnic-racial diversity; respect; tolerance; and so on – a democratic education, as can be seen in “Art. 1 Education encompasses the formative processes that develop in family life, in human coexistence, at work, in teaching and research institutions, in social movements and civil society organizations, and in cultural manifestations.” Nevertheless, the civil-military dictatorship left its indelible legacy: the militarization of everyday life, which encompasses various public policies, including in the field of education, associating the school with spaces of insecurity and implementing intervention policies in the name of care.

At the end of the 1990s, civic-military schools began to emerge in Brazilian states. The state of Goiás is considered the pioneer in implementing the system of Colégios Estaduais da Polícia Militar de Goiás (CEPMGs, “State Military Police Colleges of Goiás”). According to the Comando de Ensino da Polícia Militar de Goiás (“Goiás Military Police Teaching Command”), over the last decade of discipline and responsibility have guaranteed the efficacy and efficiency of a model of “strong, shared, and participatory management, allied to clear and rigid discipline” (Derevecki, 2023), in partnership between the Secretariat of Public Security and the Secretariat of Education. Discipline and results sweeten the so-called skills and competencies that raised scores in the IDEB ranking and knowledge olympiads, meeting school performance targets, achieving high approval rates in university entrance exams and the Exame Nacional do Ensino Médio (ENEM, “National High School Exam”), preserving public property, and reducing drug use and violence in schools.

Following the path opened by the states, the Programa Nacional das Escolas Cívico-Militares (PECIM, “National Program of Civic-Military Schools”) emerged. Established by Decree 10.004/2019, it was placed under the responsibility of the Ministry of Education in partnership with the Ministry of Defense. Its core was a policy of shared school management in the didactic-pedagogical and administrative spheres, integrating teaching staff and military personnel in order to ensure exemplary and high-quality teaching and learning, modeled on the military colleges of the army or of the military police and fire departments.

“The military will act in support of school management and educational management, while teachers and other education professionals will remain responsible for didactic-pedagogical work” (Brazil, 2019). The goal would be to combat an alleged leftist ideological indoctrination and the early sexualization of children and youth, as well as low performance in exams measuring educational quality, such as the IDEB and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), linked to the forum of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The constitution of PECIM is deeply linked to the neoconservative agenda of the Movimento Escola Sem Partido (“School Without Party Movement”), operating as a strategy of control that seeks pedagogical neutrality through military discipline. This convergence of forces resulted in structural impacts on public education, manifested in the suppression of fundamental themes in Education Plans and in the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC), especially regarding gender and sexuality, as well as in the production of a monitored environment that uses a series of coercive mechanisms, generating a scenario of intimidation and silencing of teachers, replacing pluralism of ideas with a model of behavioral and moral standardization (Acosta, Filordi and Gallo, 2026, p. 2) (Acosta et al., 2026). However, in 2023, the federal government decided to end the program, bringing to an end one of the previous administration’s priorities.

Expansion Through State Governments

In recent years, disputes over civic-military schools have intensified among state governments. While the state of Goiás takes pride in its pioneering role and in having 20% of its student body under this education regime, the government of Paraná had, by February 2026, counted 345 civic-military schools (Godoy, 2026), in a continuous expansion that surpasses all other Brazilian states. Under the motto “education, discipline, and values,” Governor Ratinho Junior proclaims his achievements on social media, stating that the expansion of these schools has the support and approval of families, students, and the school community.

One of the most recent states to invest in civic-military schools is São Paulo, through Complementary Law No. 1.398, of May 28, 2024, aimed at state, municipal, and basic education public schools. In 2026, 100 units that joined the project began their activities, distributed across 89 cities in the state, including the capital. In addition to the civil core assigned to pedagogical and administrative management, the schools include a “military core, responsible for monitoring school organization and security and for carrying out extracurricular activities of a civic-military nature,” whose composition will consist of monitors “mandatorily retired military police officers from the State of São Paulo” (São Paulo, 2024).

According to the São Paulo State Department of Education, schools’ participation in the plan is optional, with priority given to those located in regions with high crime rates. Its stated purpose is healthy coexistence based on a culture of peace, in order to mitigate school violence.

The program proposes a model of school management of excellence directed at schools with low IDEB and students in situations of social vulnerability. The Civic-Military School is another alternative to contribute to the quality of teaching in basic education, while also providing students, teachers, and staff with a safer place, with improvements to the school environment and coexistence (São Paulo, n.d.).

The operationalization of this civic-military model occurs less through supposed educational excellence than through disciplinary gain, articulating moral panic and the threat of insecurity to control spaces and bodies. Examples of disciplinarization include practices such as saluting “superiors,” the mandatory use of uniforms that refer to a military aesthetic and differ according to gender, and the singing of the national anthem in close-order drill. The norms, supported by the repressive character present in schools, follow a system of gaining or losing points, in which any deviation is worthy of negative scoring, directly affecting permanence in school.

Thus, the military presence in schools directly interferes with autonomy and pedagogical practices, even when the disciplinary core is discursively separated from the pedagogical core. Classes or interventions that criticize police action, for example, would be considered an attack on order, morality, and the proper functioning of the school, and therefore subject to repression.

For critics, the arguments in favor of civic-military schools do not hold up. Even when reiterating that there is no possible defense of this model and presenting denunciations of cases of physical and psychological violence, sexual and moral harassment perpetrated against students and teachers, its proliferation remains practically untouched. The centrality of security in democracies aligns with the intensification of increasingly securitized and militarized environments, the intensification of controls, and the curtailment of autonomies. Insecurity and violence are the corollaries of police-military interventions, whatever the environment may be.

A Cycle of Violence

As the anarchists of A Vida noted at the beginning of the twentieth century, the school systematizes violence insofar as it carries out regular work of training and containing rebellions. Projects such as today’s civic-military schools show that, although democracy entered the school as an adequate form of governing conduct, authoritarian violence still seduces and fulfills a function within the school universe. What we see today is a combination of authoritarian devices with democratic institutional forms and demands for close-order discipline issued by the governed themselves.

In securitarian democracies, military authoritarianism and the democratic participation of the vulnerable as a form of inclusion are complementary and form the mass to be delivered to the labor market with resilient resignation and proactive obedience, expanding cycles of violence and demands for security. Thus, civic-military schools are, at once, a symptom of the present and a remnant of a recalcitrant authoritarian past – something that cannot be brought down by decree, but only through educational experiences that challenge the forces of order, as did the modern schools of the anarchists in Brazil at the beginning of the twentieth century². 

Footnotes

¹  On the nationalization of education during the Vargas Era and its developments as forms of control during the Civil-Military Dictatorship, see Corrêa (2006).

²  See: Guilherme Corrêa. Educação, comunicação, anarquia: procedências da sociedade de controle no Brasil. São Paulo: Cortez, 2006.

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