Q: In general, are the issues raised in The Coup d’État Factory relevant to the UK?

Márcia Tiburi: Brazil has been a laboratory of authoritarianism, fascism and neoliberalism. Everyone needs to know the example it gives us of a democracy that died, to avoid the same thing being repeated elsewhere. The mass media are fundamental in processes of psychopower – that is, they influence the mentality, emotions and feelings of the masses. How that process works is something we should all be aware of.

Haira Gandolfi: Whenever I have to explain it to a non-Brazilian, I compare the way parts of the Brazilian traditional media have supported the far-right to how Fox News supported Donald Trump.

In the UK, there’s an analogy with how the right-wing press wields influence over a certain sector of public opinion. The difference in Brazil is that media outlets like TV Globo and Record have audience domination, not just an audience share. But while that makes it different, there are certain comparisons you could draw in terms of the mechanics.

Q. How have fake news and misinformation shaped education in Brazil?

MT: Brazil has a desperate education system in general. There are a number of projects that restrict the teaching of philosophy, sociology, geography, arts and gender studies. These are defended by extreme, right-wing deputies called escola sem partido (‘school without political party’). Education is being taken over by these extreme perspectives.

To give an example, one fake news story that these groups was the ‘Gay Kit’ myth. The claim was that the Brazilian Workers’ Party wanted to turn all children and young people into homosexuals and transsexuals. Allegedly, young children were being given a ‘gay kit’ by teachers to achieve this, featuring materials such as books about sex and a penis-shaped bottle. Bolsonaro spoke about this on the country’s biggest news programme and the presenter never once challenged him. Unfortunately, a huge part of the population believes the story is true. The circulation of these myths has allowed right-wing groups to control what teachers do in schools. There is widespread persecution of gender studies, for example. Teachers who speak about gender-related issues and different types of sexuality in the classroom have been summoned by authorities and asked to explain themselves. If they oppose the government-sponsored ‘gender ideology’, they suffer retaliation.

HG: I originally came to the UK in 2015 to do a PhD and my original plan was then to go back to Brazil. I started to reconsider when the escola sem partido movement started censoring textbooks and encouraging parental denunciations of teachers who were seen as promoting ‘communist’ – or anti-capitalist – ideas in the classroom.

One of the main uses of fake news like the ‘Gay Kit’ story was not just to demonise teachers, but to justify legislative limits on what they could do. I didn’t feel safe going back because of the work that I do on decolonisation and anti-racism – these are exactly the kinds of things the movement has targeted.

These incidents limit how much teachers can do their jobs. A good biology teacher, for example, needs to cover topics such as gender and sexuality by addressing the biological, social and psychological perspectives on those topics.

Populist politics is censoring those kinds of discussions. Students have even been encouraged to denounce teachers, by recording them on their phones and sending the clips to right-wing media or politicians. Needless to say, what then appears in the news is completely unrepresentative of what actually went on in the classroom.

Q. The British government has received considerable attention and some guarded criticism for its guidance on ‘political impartiality’ in English classrooms. Does this guidance help or hinder learning about fake news?

MT: The moral and political task of education cannot be erased. Pierre Bourdieu warned that education could be a reproduction of a system of oppression. This is the most common issue we face in a political sense.

One way to look at this is to contrast two possible ways of teaching students. One is the ‘banking education’ of which Paulo Freire spoke, in which students are passive and have knowledge ‘deposited’ into them by a teacher.

The other is education which makes students critical and analytical thinkers. This is education for emancipation – or education for autonomy, as Freire called it. The second form allows teachers to alert young people to the power games that define their lives. So it is implicitly political.

HG: It’s important to stress that the Government is not using the same language that we have seen constrain teachers in Brazil in the recent guidance: it is nowhere near as extreme. But we can legitimately worry about where it might be leading, as some teachers’ organisations have pointed out. Saying that teachers should avoid even discussing what the government believes to be ‘widely contested’ views, such as systemic racism or Critical Race Theory (which is actually a longstanding academic area of research, with very sound and respected intellectual developments), sounds a lot like the beginning of what happened in Brazil.

Education is, inevitably, political. That doesn’t mean teachers should ever indoctrinate pupils. What it means is that different ways of organising society and different decisions have consequences. If you’re going to teach urban planning in a geography class, for instance, students need to know how this can enable or marginalise certain groups of people. What some consider to be 'sensitive’ topics – like gender and sexuality, climate change, the history of slavery – need to be thought about critically in order to be understood. If we decide that some takes on these issues are now off-limits as ‘political’ positioning, we cancel that opportunity. It’s an incredibly dangerous way to prepare young people for a complex world.