neighbourhood of Recanto das Emas, the day begins with a pep talk
from Lt Mario Vitor Barbosa Magalhães.
"This week has been very demanding - the vast majority of you
have succeeded in doing what's needed of you, both in the
classroom and with homework," he shouts. "Very good, but every
day we need to improve, every day is a new challenge."
The children then belt out the national anthem, standing in front of
the Brazilian flag with its motto "Order and Progress". The aim is to
reinforce a sense of national pride that many feel has been lost in
Brazil in recent years.
In a way it feels more like a police academy than a school. Here,
police are in charge of the discipline, leaving the education to the
teachers.
It has been a turnaround, says deputy head Debora Rodrigues Sales,
who has been teaching in this school for 20 years.
Until a few months ago, you would more likely see drug traffickers
than uniformed officers at the school gate. A sign of it is the bullet
mark on the metal door, the result of a recent shoot-out.
"As time went on, people were asking for a police intervention," she
says. "When this idea of a school shared with military police came
up, we said 'yes' straight away."
Militarisation of schools
There are around 120 "militarised" schools in the country. But the
election last year of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, a former
army officer who has promised to crack down on violence and
improve education, has propelled their growth more than ever.
Is the honeymoon period over for Bolsonaro?
Brazil's unlikely president
Educational Centre 308 is part of a pilot project where management
is shared between teachers and police in Brasília. The plan is for the
number of these schools to grow from four to 40 by the end of the
year and to 200 by the end of President Bolsonaro's four-year
mandate.
Ms Sales, though, admits that some of her colleagues walked away,
unhappy with the police presence in the school.
The assistant secretary of education for Brasília, Mauro Oliveira,
says the controversial move was necessary. "We're talking about
vulnerable schools, we're talking about drugs inside, teachers being
threatened, so we need to go back to basics."
"As a democracy we should understand and do what the majority
wants. People wanted a school that could offer more discipline and
more safety for the kids," he explains.
'Left-wing indoctrination'
But Jair Bolsonaro's focus on education is not just focussed on
public security. He has also called for an end to what he has called
"indoctrination" by left-wing teachers.
In the week he was inaugurated in January, he tweeted about his
desire to "tackle the Marxist garbage in our schools head on". He
added: "We shall succeed in forming citizens and not political
militants."
He has taken aim at one of Brazil's most famous educationalists,
Paulo Freire, an advocate of teaching critical thought in schools.
President Bolsonaro thinks Mr Freire, a socialist who was briefly
imprisoned during the military dictatorship of 1964-1985 and who
died in 1997, has played too influential a role in Brazilian education.
The president threatened to "enter the education ministry with a
flamethrower" to remove Mr Freire's ideals.
Bolsonaro: What are his policies?
Miguel Nagib thoroughly backs President Bolsonaro's aims. He
founded Escola Sem Partido (Portuguese for School Without Party),
an initiative to stamp out party politics from the classroom.
Mr Nagib blames the left-wing governments of Luiz Inácio Lula da
Silva and Dilma Rousseff for what he says is the "indoctrination" of
Brazilian students.
"When teachers are sympathetic to one party or another and
promote that ideology, they're creating an imbalance in democracy,"
he argues.
He concedes that there are teachers on the right who use
classrooms "for ideological means" but, he says, "they're snipers,
they work alone".
"The party politics in Brazil came with the Workers' Party," he says
of the party which governed Brazil from 2003 to 2011.
'An enemy that doesn't exist'
Many say that this attitude is a sign of the creeping conservatism in
the Bolsonaro administration.
"It's important for the government to have an enemy to fight,"
explains Mauricio Fronzaglia of the Mackenzie Presbyterian
University in São Paulo.
"They've created this caricatured vision that schools and
universities are spaces to share Marxist ideas that need to be
defeated. It's not true but it's a way of retaining the support of its
voters."
The government has vowed to revise sex education in schools and
there has also been talk of removing discussions about LGBT rights,
gender violence and feminism.
Just a few weeks ago, the then-education minister, Ricardo Vélez,
who has since been fired, suggested textbooks should be changed
to deny the 1964 military takeover was a coup . Mr Bolsonaro has
long defended the military's role, arguing it saved Brazil from
communism.
"Once you start revising those political moments, valuing acts of
violence and repression, you have to ask, what does this say about
society?" says Cândido Granjeiro, president of the Brazilian
Association of Textbooks.
"There are signs this government wants very specific content, to
impose their way of doing things. That's something we've not seen
before and it worries us."
At the Amorim Lima school in São Paulo, things could not be more
different. The teachers greet the students with a kiss, sit on the
floor for some of their lessons, and students have more freedom in
how they learn.
Unsurprisingly, people disagree with Mr Bolsonaro's view of
indoctrination. "We need these open spaces to talk," says Principal
Ana Elisa Siquiera.
"What the government is trying to do is impose a doctrine, because
they aren't letting people debate, discuss and believe in other
things. Why should I only believe what the government is saying?
They want to stop people from thinking. It's a total step back."
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