The creation of the National System of Education in Brazil has been justified by several factors, but not by the secularity of public education. For the author, such omission expresses insufficient understanding of the republican State and its policies, especially educational policies. This convenient (complicit?) silence favors the current status of religious education in public schools, marked by legal anomie and pedagogical folly. Both "pathologies" thrive in the Brazilian educational apparatus fragmented into multiple systems, paving the way for the struggle for religious hegemony in the educational field, depriving the public school of an essential condition of the Republican practice - freedom of thought and belief, both due to the secular State.
Secularism; Public school; Educational policies; Brazilian education