Cultural Heritage Education and Brazilian Schooling Policies

Abstract

This paper aims to reconstruct the trajectory of cultural heritage education in Brazilian schooling policies in order to understand the shifts in their political and cultural contents, from a model of education centered on the ideological formulation of a national drive to a statute erected under the aegis of cultural diversity. Based on document analysis, it concludes that the meanings assigned to cultural heritage education follow a tendency to the patrimonialization of differences through the recognition of actors and social groups not incorporated into the policies. However, its presence in this context still is quite peripheral, given the number of different socioeconomic interests in dispute in the definition of heritage and in their practices.