"Well, We Certainly Still Flirted": (Un)realities of Moral, Sexual, and Anticommunist Inculcation in Brazil

"Well, We Certainly Still Flirted": (Un)realities of Moral, Sexual, and Anticommunist Inculcation in Brazil

This paper takes up a particular aspect of the cultural Cold War as it played out on the ground—or, better said, in the classroom and the bedroom. Having uncovered the history of repressive, state-centered, and security-focused “remoralization” as a key element in the Brazilian dictatorship’s strategy for fighting putative subversion, I now turn to the issue of how this remoralization worked and did not work. In 1969, the Brazilian military government instituted a new, mandatory discipline at all levels of schooling: Educação Moral e Cívica (Moral and Civic Education, EMC), designed by right-wing ideologues to immunize Brazil’s schoolchildren against the twin threats of communism and sexual deviance. The new discipline included various sets of guidelines and a plethora of authorized and unauthorized textbooks for achieving this purpose—but little is known about reaction to the initiative on the part of the people who confronted it daily: teachers and students. Drawing on oral histories of people who studied and taught EMC in the period, I use this paper to investigate the extent of (1) awareness of the program’s provenance and goals; (2) effectiveness of EMC at shaping behavior of teachers and their young charges; and (3) the ways in which EMC served as a touchstone for resistance to the dictatorship.