Exclusionary Rationalities in Brazilian Schooling

"This is a remarkable book on Exclusion in Brazilian Schools. Thanks to extensive historical research, Natália Gil offers us an admirable synthesis of quantification, classification, and other colonized rationalities that, in Brazil, have marked the history of education over the centuries." - António Nóvoa, University of Lisbon, Portugal

“This comprehensive study of the Brazilian school system discusses central issues of our times, which speak to problems and debates equally felt in different latitudes. Natália Gil’s analysis focuses on the production of inequalities through testing and grading, the role of school organization and academic regime, particularly policies on retention and promotion, the rise of meritocracy, and the quantification of educational problems, and calls for a decolonizing of educational rationales. The author undertakes a historical approach that ranges from the emergence of modern schooling to contemporary debates in the press on evaluation and promotion and educational quality, and it does so using a wide set of archival documents and pedagogical literature. Through this detailed study, Natália Gil provides a well-sustained argument about the need to rethink how schools are organized and what is at stake in contemporary educational reforms.” - Inés Dussel, DIE-Cinvestav, Mexico; President, International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE)

"This is a remarkable book on Exclusion in Brazilian Schools. Thanks to extensive historical research, Natália Gil offers us an admirable synthesis of quantification, classification, and other colonized rationalities that, in Brazil, have marked the history of education over the centuries." - António Nóvoa, University of Lisbon, Portugal

“This comprehensive study of the Brazilian school system discusses central issues of our times, which speak to problems and debates equally felt in different latitudes. Natália Gil’s analysis focuses on the production of inequalities through testing and grading, the role of school organization and academic regime, particularly policies on retention and promotion, the rise of meritocracy, and the quantification of educational problems, and calls for a decolonizing of educational rationales. The author undertakes a historical approach that ranges from the emergence of modern schooling to contemporary debates in the press on evaluation and promotion and educational quality, and it does so using a wide set of archival documents and pedagogical literature. Through this detailed study, Natália Gil provides a well-sustained argument about the need to rethink how schools are organized and what is at stake in contemporary educational reforms.” - Inés Dussel, DIE-Cinvestav, Mexico; President, International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE)

"Natália Gil’s Exclusionary Rationalities in Brazilian Schooling: Decolonizing Historical Studies has a historical, cultural/sociological elegance importance in the understanding of the politics of knowledge in modernity and its issues of coloniality. The book’s exploration of the representational logics and the inscriptions of statistics in the practices of educational measurement and evaluation makes visible the political of what seems as the non-polemic diagnoses of children’s learning and evaluation. Made visible are how the infrastructures of the sciences assemble European rationalities in a comparative reason connected to solving the large-scale social dilemmas, issues of exclusion, and the democratization of Brazilian education. The detailed historical analyses makes a significant contribution for thinking about how phenomena of measurement perform as spaces of action in schooling that differentiate and distribute differences designed to include and correct social wrong." - Thomas S. Popkewitz, University of Wisconsin-Madison