The formation of a large-scale policy for the production and distribution of school textbooks through COLTED and FENAME (1966–1983)

Abstract

This article analyzes the constitution of large-scale public policies for the production, evaluation, and distribution of textbooks during the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship, focusing on the period between 1966, the year in which the Commission for Technical and Textbooks (COLTED) was
created, and 1983, when the National Foundation for School Materials (FENAME) was dissolved. The article is based on the hypothesis that these state apparatuses played strategic roles in consolidating an educational policy aimed at expanding compulsory schooling, reorganizing curricula, and disseminating values compatible with the regime’s authoritarian, technocratic, and anti-communist project. At the same time, it argues that these institutions were traversed by disputes involving the State, the private publishing market, foreign interests, political interference, and corrupt practices. Methodologically, the research employs qualitative content analysis, drawing on official documents, ministerial reports, agreements, correspondence, legislation, and records located especially in the Historical Archive of INEP. The article concludes that the analysis of COLTED and FENAME makes it possible to understand the ambiguities of an educational policy that combined school expansion, ideological control, market-oriented inducement, and the private appropriation of public resources within the civil-military dictatorship.