For seven years, homeschooling in Brazil has lived in a constitutional half-light: not forbidden, not authorized, and not regulated. In 2018 the country's Supreme Court held that educating children at home does not breach the Constitution, but it left the practice unusable until Congress passed a law to govern it — a law that still does not exist. A criminal court in the interior of São Paulo state has now filled that silence with a verdict, and the result is the first case of its kind in the country.
Pun
The defendants are Adauto and Ieda Denardi, a couple from Jales who withdrew their two daughters from school during the pandemic and taught them at home instead. In late April a judge convicted the pair of "intellectual neglect" — an offense aimed at parents who deny a child basic schooling — and sentenced them to 50 days of detention. What had until then been treated as a paperwork failure, a matter of not enrolling children in a recognized institution, became, in their case, a crime. The legal group ADF International, which is backing the family, says no Brazilian parents had ever before been criminally punished for home education.
