In the last week of April 2026, a criminal court in the interior of São Paulo state convicted a married couple of a crime. Not fraud. Not neglect in the sense any parent would recognize. The crime was that they taught their two daughters at home.
The sentence, handed down by the 2nd Criminal Court of Jales, was 50 days of detention in a semi-open regime. It was suspended for two years on one condition: enroll the girls in a regular school and prove they attend. The parents were also ordered to perform community service. The legal basis was Article 246 of the Brazilian Penal Code — abandono intelectual, intellectual abandonment. A statute written in 1940 to punish parents who left their children ignorant.
The case file ran to more than 5,000 pages. It contained annual psychopedagogical assessments of both girls. It contained records of a mother teaching alongside two hired private instructors. It contained the daughters’ academic awards. The prosecution itself had asked for acquittal.
The judge convicted anyway.
The crime that is not a crime
Here is the part that Americans find hardest to believe: homeschooling is not illegal in Brazil. The Supreme Federal Court said so itself.
On 12 September 2018, in Recurso Extraordinário 888.815, the Court ruled 9 to 1 — Justice Roberto Barroso the lone dissent — that home education does not violate the Constitution. What it violates is the absence of a law. The Court’s position was that home education could become perfectly valid the moment Congress passed federal legislation defining how it would be evaluated and supervised. Until then, families who do it are operating in a vacuum, and prosecutors are free to treat that vacuum as a crime.
So Brazil arrived at a uniquely Brazilian arrangement. The practice is constitutional. The practice is also prosecutable. The only thing standing between a homeschooling family and a criminal record is which prosecutor happens to open their file.
Four years in a drawer
Congress was told exactly what to do. It has not done it.
The Chamber of Deputies passed PL 1.338/2022 in May 2022, after roughly a decade of argument. The bill is not permissive. It requires homeschooled children to be registered with a school for monitoring. It requires regular evaluations and quarterly reports from parents on what was taught. It requires periodic family meetings organised by the school. It requires that at least one parent hold a higher-education or technical qualification. It bars parents with convictions for child abuse, domestic violence, heinous crimes or drug offences.
In other words: a supervision regime stricter than most American states impose, drafted by a legislature that was ordered by its own Supreme Court to legislate.
It arrived in the Senate in May 2022. It is still there. A favourable report was filed by Senator Professora Dorinha. The Education Committee, chaired through the end of 2026 by a senator who opposes home education, has simply not scheduled it. Reporting from late 2025 put realistic movement in 2027 at the earliest — a new committee chair, a new session, five years after the vote.
Roughly 35,000 Brazilian families, and something on the order of 70,000 children aged 4 to 17, are living inside that delay. The delay is not an accident of a busy calendar. A bill does not sit untouched for four years by coincidence. It sits because someone with the power to schedule it prefers it unscheduled.
What, exactly, is being protected
The state’s argument is that these children must be in school for their own good. It is worth asking what is waiting for them there.
In PISA 2022, the OECD’s international assessment of 15-year-olds, Brazil scored 379 in mathematics, 410 in reading and 403 in science. The OECD averages were 472, 476 and 485. Brazil ranked 64th of 81 participating countries and economies in mathematics, 61st in science, 53rd in reading — behind Chile, Uruguay, Mexico and Costa Rica.
The ranking is the polite version. The proficiency data is the real one. Only 27% of Brazilian 15-year-olds reached Level 2 in mathematics, the floor the OECD defines as basic competence — the ability to do the arithmetic a shopkeeper needs. Across the OECD, 69% clear it. Which means roughly three out of four Brazilian teenagers cannot do basic mathematics. In science, 45% clear the floor. In reading, 50%. Just 1% of Brazilian students reached the top levels, against 9% internationally.
Further down the system it does not improve. The federal government celebrated in March 2026 that 66% of Brazilian children were literate by the end of second grade in the 2025 assessment — announced as a victory, because the target had been 64%. Read it the other way: one in three Brazilian eight-year-olds finishes second grade unable to read properly, and the government threw a ceremony. Among adults aged 15 to 64, the 2024 Inaf indicator found 29% functionally illiterate — the same figure as 2018. Six years, no movement.
This is the institution a court in Jales ordered two girls into, at the threat of their parents’ liberty. Not because the school could demonstrate it would teach them better. Because it is the school.
The word the judge used
In his ruling, the judge wrote that the mother had used her children as subjects in an ideological campaign.
Sit with that for a moment. A mother who hired two tutors, submitted her daughters to annual psychopedagogical evaluation, and produced 5,000 pages of documentation is the ideologue. The system that cannot teach three-quarters of its teenagers to multiply is the neutral party.
Brazil’s classrooms are not the blank space that framing implies. A peer-reviewed survey of history teachers across Mercosur and Chile found that in Brazil, 84.5% identified with left or centre-left parties; centre, centre-right and right together accounted for 15.5%. The researchers were careful, and honest, about what they found: they detected no deliberate campaign of indoctrination, and teachers across the spectrum taught the historiography correctly. Fine. Take them at their word — it makes the point worse, not better.
A monoculture does not require a conspiracy to be a monoculture. When more than eight in ten teachers of a discipline that is about contested interpretation share one political home, the range of questions that get asked narrows on its own. Not by design. By absence. Nobody has to indoctrinate anyone. There is simply nobody left in the room to say “but consider it this way,” and a child who never hears the sentence never learns that it exists.
And Brazilians are not imagining it. In March 2022, Datafolha asked 2,090 people whether teachers should discuss politics in the classroom. 56% said teachers should avoid it. That is not a fringe of angry parents. That is the majority of the country, in a poll with a two-point margin of error, saying the thing out loud.
The country then tried to legislate it. The Escola Sem Partido movement produced bills in 15 states and 66 municipalities across 22 states by 2017 alone — an enormous, disorganised, nationwide attempt to write classroom neutrality into law. Whatever one thinks of the drafting, and much of it was bad, the volume tells you something about how many families believed they had a problem.
The Supreme Court struck it down. In ADI 5.537, decided in August 2020, the Court invalidated the Alagoas law by 9 to 1. Companion cases fell with it. More have been filed against municipal versions since.
Meanwhile a whole genre grew on Brazilian YouTube: classroom footage, filmed on phones from the back row by students, of teachers campaigning from the front of the room. Individually the clips prove nothing — they are shot without context, and the internet rewards the worst thirty seconds of anyone’s day. Collectively they are evidence of a different fact, and a more damning one: a generation of Brazilian students concluded that the only way to be believed about what happens in their own classroom was to film it.
So follow the loop to its end. Parents cannot get a neutrality law — the Court struck those down. Parents cannot get a home education law — the Senate will not schedule the vote. And parents who simply remove their children and teach them themselves get prosecuted under a 1940 statute for intellectual abandonment.
Three exits. All of them sealed. And when a mother tries the only one left, a judge writes that she is the one running an ideological campaign.
Why an American homeschooler should care
Because the argument is the same argument.
Every objection raised against Brazilian homeschooling families — that they are isolating their children, that they are unqualified, that the state must verify, that socialisation requires a building — has been raised in English, in legislative hearings, in the last fifteen years. The difference is not the argument. The difference is that in Brazil it won, and the enforcement mechanism turned out to be a criminal statute from 1940.
The lesson is not that Brazil is a cautionary tale about somewhere else. It is that a legal right which exists only because a court declined to forbid it, and which no legislature ever bothered to write down, is not a right. It is a delay. Brazilian families are five years into finding that out.
Teaching Brazil while Brazil argues about teaching
There is an irony we live with daily. We are a four-person family studio in Rio de Janeiro that builds homeschool unit studies about Brazil — for families in the United States, Canada, Australia and the UK who are legally free to use them. We could not legally use our own materials as our children’s primary education here, in the country the materials are about.
So we build them for the families who can. The Brazil Complete Unit Study runs 327 pages across ten units, with an answer key for every one of them, three reading levels on the same page, six maps, a lapbook and a final exam. The Amazon: A Complete Rainforest Unit Study covers 16 units in full colour for ages 5 to 13, and is now in paperback. Every number in both books was checked against IBGE, IUCN, UNESCO, IPHAN and INEP — the same INEP whose data is quoted above, which is worth a small, bitter laugh.
If you are homeschooling in a country where that is simply legal, use it. There are 70,000 children here whose parents are waiting on a Senate committee to schedule a vote.
Sources: 2nd Criminal Court of Jales, ruling of 29 April 2026, reported by Migalhas and Gazeta do Povo; Supremo Tribunal Federal, RE 888.815 (Tema 822), judged 12 September 2018; PL 1.338/2022, Federal Senate; OECD PISA 2022 country results for Brazil, via INEP; Inaf 2024 functional literacy indicator; Ministry of Education literacy figures announced 23 March 2026; Pacievitch & Cerri, “Esquerda ou direita? Professores, opção política e didática da história”; Datafolha survey of 8–15 March 2022, 2,090 respondents; Supremo Tribunal Federal, ADI 5.537/AL, judged 22 August 2020.
Books That Teach Brazil Properly at Home
If the argument in this piece is that the classroom is not the only place a child can learn, the follow-up question is what you put on the shelf. These are written for children and hold up to an adult reading them out loud.
- Living in… Brazil — A Brazilian child narrates her own country. No safari-tour tone.
- Good Night Brazil — For the youngest ones, and the first Brazilian place names they will learn.
- Saudade — A picture book about leaving Brazil and missing it, which is a real childhood.
- Our World: Brazil — Board book, first geography, the map before the words.
- Lonely Planet Portuguese Phrasebook — Because a language learned at the kitchen table sticks.
Our own Brazil unit study runs alongside these: 327 pages, ten units, written for grades 3 to 8 and marked for you.
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