President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva participated, this Thursday night (13), in Brasília, in the 59th Congress of the National Union of Students (UNE). The last time a President of the Republic attended the event was in 2009, when Lula himself, during his second term, attended the student meeting. The UNE Congress, or Conune, as it is usually called, is considered the largest student meeting in Latin America and should bring together around 10,000 participants until next Sunday (16) in the federal capital. At the event, the president promised to expand the number of universities and other teaching institutions in the country. “We are going to go back to building more universities, to building more technical schools, more laboratories, we are going to meet with deans and students, we are going to put the poor in the Union budget again”, he assured in front of a full Nilson Nelson gymnasium. Such a promise had already been made during the election campaign, in 2022. During the ceremony, representatives of student organizations read and delivered a letter of demands to the president. Among the main points are the maintenance of the policy of quotas and expansion of the right of access for indigenous and transgender people, the creation of the University of Integration of the Amazon and the approval of a law to establish the National Student Assistance Program. In addition, the UNE reiterated, in the document, the request for the government to revoke the New Secondary School, a demand repeated several times by students in slogans shouted in the gym. In his speech, Lula also praised the strength of the student movement. “What motivates human life and what motivates our ability to be better or not is whether we have a cause or not,” he said. “I find it extraordinary that UNE presents a long, arduous and spicy list of demands”, he added. Brasília (DF), 07/13/2023, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva participates in the 59th Congress of the National Union of Students (UNE). The meeting was attended by the former president of Uruguay Pepe Mujica. Photo: Valter Campanato/Agência Brasil Speaking in front of an audience of thousands of young people, Lula celebrated that the social profile of students has changed over the last decade, with the entry of poor and black people into universities, especially from the programs created in their previous governments. “Here there are not only children of rich people, here there are children of masons, maids, here there are children of metallurgists, chemists, printers. Here is the daughter and son of the Brazilian people, with our face”. Defense of democracy The president even made an emphatic defense of democracy, citing the threats of rupture in the last period. “A very short time ago, you knew what fascism, Nazism is, in just four years. How can democracy and the conquests that people sometimes take centuries to conquer be destroyed? I hope we have learned a lesson, that democracy may not be the most perfect thing humanity has created, but there is nothing like it. It is in democracy that we can experience plurality, diversity, that we can applaud, we can boo, we can shout and we can contest. It is in democracy that we experience the full manifestation of the human being”, he said. In addition to Lula, the former president of Uruguay, Pepe Mujica, and ministers of the federal government, including the Minister of Education, Camilo Santana, participated in the political act. In a speech, Mujica, who was a political prisoner for 14 years under the Uruguayan dictatorship, urged students to seek unity to defend democracy. “Don’t make the mistake of my time. The more disunited, the more dominated we will be. Therefore, study, do not waste time, take care of democracy. Democracy is not perfect, it is full of defects. But, to date, we haven’t found anything better,” he said. The former president of Uruguay also appealed to the students to support the Lula government in the face of management challenges. “Lula is great, but he is not a magician. People’s governments are not only asked, but helped. The obstacles ahead are there and they are not simple. It’s easy to complain, but you have to compromise,” he said. New Secondary School At various times during the act, students chanted to ask for the repeal of the law that instituted the New Secondary School. In his speech, the Minister of Education, Camilo Santana, who was booed and interrupted by the students, recalled that the government has paralyzed the implementation of the new model until eventual changes are defined. “I suspended the implementation of the New Secondary School in Brazil. And we opened a wide listening to listen to students. There were 150,000 students who participated. We listen to teachers, entities, secretaries”, he defended himself, when mentioning the public consultation process opened by the portfolio and which ended last week. The New Secondary School law was approved in 2017, during the government of former President Michel Temer, with the aim of making the stage more attractive and preventing students from dropping out of school. According to the model, part of the classes must be common to all students in the country, guided by the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC). In the other part of the training, the students themselves will be able to choose an itinerary to deepen their learning. Among the options is to emphasize, for example, the areas of languages, mathematics, natural sciences, human sciences or technical education. The offer of itineraries, however, will depend on the capacity of the teaching networks and schools, which has been one of the biggest challenges in implementing the new stage. In 2023, the implementation should continue with the 1st and 2nd years and the itineraries should start to be implemented in most schools, but the schedule was suspended by the federal government until there is a systematization of the public consultation proposals and possible adjustments in the new stage education. The repeal of the New Secondary School has been a demand from sector entities and many specialists. Despite this, the federal government did not consider revoking the measure completely, but making adjustments based on the results obtained in the consultation.
Agência Brasil
Folha Nobre - Desde 2013 - ©