Education networks across the country have adapted curricula and training processes to comply with the Brazilian legislation since 2003which made the teaching of Afro-Brazilian history and culture mandatory in schools from kindergarten to high schoolbut religious issues and the lack of dialogue still represent an obstacle, even after more than 20 years. 
In the middle of Black Consciousness Month, for example, a public school in São Paulo witnessed the entry of armed police officers after a father called the agents because his daughter had drawn a drawing of an orixá in a school activity. The case was criticized by parents, the school community and politicians.
To comply with legislation, schools in the capital of São Paulo are supplied with works with ethnic-racial themes. According to the São Paulo Municipal Department of Education, 700,000 copies were acquired in 2022, including works for children, young people and adults.
The units also go through training processes and have reference documents, such as the document “Pedagogical Guidelines: Afro-Brazilian Peoples”, which provides guidelines to support practices that value Afro-Brazilian, indigenous and migrant histories and cultures.
“The actions are monitored by the Education Center for Ethnic-Racial Relations (NEER), responsible for supporting educational units in implementing anti-racist practices and integrating this collection into the City Curriculum”, the secretariat informed the Brazil Agencyin note.
At the state level, guidance for teaching staff occurs through the Multiplica Educação Antiracista Program, conducted by the Coordination of Inclusive Education (COEIN) and EFAPE (School of Training and Improvement of Education Professionals). Since 2024, 6,800 teachers have undergone training on African culture and religiosity.
“This implementation ensures that the contents are incorporated into the school routine as an essential part of students’ historical and cultural training”, explained Seduc-SP.
“I don’t work religion, I teach culture”
For more than two decades, professor Núbia Esteves has been teaching geography to elementary and high school students. Awarded for her work in preserving school memory and the neighborhood where EMEF Solano Trindade is located, in Jardim Boa Vista, on the outskirts of the west zone of São Paulo, she applies the teaching of Afro-descendant culture in her discipline and in interdisciplinary projects.
“I don’t work on religion. I work on the orixás outside of the religious issue, considering the cultural issue. I approach cultural archetypes, mythology, with a comparative mythology”, he explains.
In the teacher’s classes, students learn how orixás express human characteristics and compared them to symbols of other beliefs, such as the proximity between Iansã and the Greek goddess Athena, between Oxum and Aphrodite, between Xangô and Zeus.
“I end up having a debate, because such different people create such similar myths. And I include the theme in the conception that these people have about, for example, the importance of preserving the environment and the importance it has for humanity. I show how orixás protect the sea (Iemanjá), the forests (Oxóssi) and other elements of nature.”
Another teacher strategy is the use of comics or audiovisual recordings. “You can work with literature, read excerpts from Pierre Verger or Reginaldo Prandi, for example, and then create comics and strings. Once a student created a comic that was an orixá, talking to a Greek god. That’s how I start working, I use the paintings from Caribé, from Master Didi and then I bring that in, without necessarily working on their relationship with religions”, says the teacher.
Conversation circles are also part of the curriculum, a time for students to reflect on ethics, coexistence and individual values.
However, professor Núbia Esteves reports that she has already been questioned by students because she is discussing religion in the classroom.
“I tell them that this is not the issue, that working with the orixás is a cultural and not a religious form. I present them as part of the history, art, literature, formation of Brazil, and that it is an inheritance that came from the African continent, along with the people. In the same way that the school studies Greek mythology, indigenous legends, saints in popular festivals, we can also work with African symbols, and that this (this resistance) was built in people on the racial issue, within the racism, which was a project for us to demonize everything that is African, which we cannot do”, he ponders.
The culture of religious origin is central to the construction of anti-racist education, he highlights.
“I can work on Saint John in the June festivals, within a popular culture, Saint Anthony too, in baroque works, that doesn’t mean I’m talking about religion. I can talk about all these symbols and not necessarily talk about religion, and that it’s important for us to know, because we get to know the culture of another people, we start to decolonize and demystify and become less racist”, concludes the teacher.
