This paper addresses the aggravation of the duality of current Brazilian public schools, characterized as a school of knowledge for the rich and a school of social care for the poor. Such dualism - which is perverse because it reproduces and maintains social inequalities - has obvious links not only with the educational reforms initiated in England in the 1980s, in the context of the neoliberal policies, but also and especially with the international agreements on the Education for All movement, whose mark was the World Conference on Education for All held in Jomtien, Thailand in 1990, under the auspices of the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations Educational and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Based on bibliographic research, the text argues that the association between the educational policies of the World Bank for developing countries and the features of the dualistic school offers substantive explanations for the unremitting decline in the Brazilian public school system over the past 30 years. At the end, the text discusses again the objectives and functions of public schools.
Policies for public school; public school decline; World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien; education and poverty; dualistic school