On June 28, 2016, your biography published in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia was altered in order to discredit your legacy and contributions and defame your name.11 Brasil Wikiedits, a group that monitors modifications in Wikipedia pages, identified SERPRO (the technical informational network of the Brazilian federal government), as the responsible source. While SERPRO denied direct involvement, it accepted that the alteration came from its network.
The changes made to the page included the insertion of paragraphs from a text entitled "Paulo Freire e o Assassinato do Conhecimiento" ("Paulo Freire and the Assassination of Knowledge") originally published by Brazil's Liberal Institute. These paragraphs argued that you and your work are the backbone of Brazil's backward and weak educational project and the origin of Marxist indoctrination in schools.
There it is, [Paulo Freire] one of the origins of our well-known Marxist indoctrination in schools and universities that instead of forming citizens and professionals for the country's growth, forms soldiers willing to defend Marxism tooth and nail in academic settings. (Rosa, 2016, my translation)12
As your widow Ana Maria Araújo Freire ("Nita") clearly stated in a letter to Brazil's then-interim President Temer, dated June 30, 2016, the absurdity and irony of such "hate claims"; by the present-day state machine can best be understood when measured against the tributes that you Paulo have received in this same year (2016), including your recognition in the USA as the third intellectual most cited in the world and in the history of humanity, and most studied in North American universities where, as Nita argues, Marxism is certainly not the predominant base of thought.13
These false claims and alterations are a constitutive part of the extreme Right's movement and project "Escola sem partido (Schooling without political party), already in place in a number of Brazilian states. The professed aim is to eliminate ideological indoctrination in universities and schools that, according to this movement, have been dominated for decades by Left-wing parties. The central targets of this "cleansing" are politics, gender, and non-Christian religions. The plan is to prohibit the teaching and discussion of all three in the nation's system of education and, accordingly, to rewrite history, curricula, educational manuals, and texts (Lehmann da Silva, 2016).
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level-5 vital article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
