What Future Are We Preparing Our Children For? Brazil Presidential Election 2026

Perhaps school should not manufacture consciousness. Perhaps it should help each Body-Territory understand and expand the consciousness it already possesses.

A child walks into school carrying much more than a backpack.

They bring a family.

A language.

A neighborhood.

A village.

A peripheral community.

A memory.

A way of perceiving danger, affection, work, money, nature, and the future.

They also bring a body that slept well or poorly, that is nourished or hungry, that walked ten minutes to school or spent two hours commuting.

And today they bring something no previous generation has carried with such intensity: a digital history being built while they are still discovering who they are.

Social networks learn what captures their attention.

Games discover what keeps them engaged.

Platforms record their choices.

Algorithms infer preferences.

Betting platforms turn expectation into continuous stimulation.

And artificial intelligence begins answering questions before children have even fully learned how to formulate them.

Meanwhile, school often continues to ask:

How much content can we put inside this student?

Perhaps the question itself is wrong.

What if the student never arrived empty?

The stamp we call education

There is a silent form of coloniality that still runs through education.

First, we define a model of what an educated person should be.

Good grades.

A good profession.

Good behavior.

Good productivity.

The “right” way to live.

Then we try to move every new generation toward that same point.

In BrainLatam’s 5D Consciousness framework, we can think of this as a local optimum: a solution that emerged within a particular historical, economic, and cultural context and later began to be treated as if it were the best destination for everyone.

Then we stamp it onto each generation.

And call the stamp education.

But this is a human construction.

Not a universal truth.

Literacy, mathematics, science, history, and technology are essential precisely because they expand possibilities.

The problem begins when knowledge stops being a tool and starts carrying with it a ready-made consciousness about what a person is supposed to become.

Recent Latin American research continues to question this logic. In work published in 2022 drawing on experiences in Brazil and Argentina, Ramon Rodrigues Ramalho revisits Paulo Freire’s pedagogy as a process in which people participate in reading and transforming reality rather than merely receiving content.

In 2026, Iracema Santos do Nascimento and Juliana Froeder Alves Grilo showed, through an educational experience in Campo Limpo, São Paulo, how decolonial perspectives can territorialize the curriculum and challenge an exclusively Euro-white-Western canon without abandoning school or systematic knowledge.

So the question is not whether we should teach less.

It is:

How can we teach more without erasing the person who is learning?

What the presidential candidates are putting on the table

The presidential proposals differ significantly. They are summarized here only as content from government plans and current electoral reporting, not as a ranking, endorsement, or recommendation.

Lula emphasizes expanding educational opportunities, inclusion, and public education policies. Flávio Bolsonaro proposes phonics-based literacy, civic-military schools, educational choice mechanisms, technical education, and closer ties between universities, science, and the productive sector. Romeu Zema links education to management, efficiency, technical training, and productive integration. Ronaldo Caiado emphasizes literacy and recovery of basic learning. Renan Santos emphasizes literacy, merit, discipline, and technological education.

Augusto Cury places socio-emotional education among his central priorities. Clariana Barão emphasizes literacy, teachers, and training. Edmilson Costa, Hertz Dias, Rui Costa Pimenta, and Samara Martins, through different approaches, defend expansion of public education and access. Wilson Grassi connects technical education, science, and research. For Pablo Marçal, we have not yet identified sufficiently consolidated educational documentation to justify filling the gaps with assumptions.

You do not have to simply choose among these statements.

You can add questions.

When someone speaks about merit:

did everyone start from the same Body-Territory?

When someone speaks about productivity:

produce what, for whom, and with what consequences for the biome?

When someone speaks about discipline:

will the student also learn how to recover control of their own attention?

When someone speaks about inclusion:

is getting through the door enough, or must we also make it possible to remain, understand, and create?

And when someone speaks about artificial intelligence:

Will AI know the student better in order to classify them, or so that the student can know themselves better?

That difference is enormous.

Body-Territory: the child arrives carrying a world

In Ancestral Future, published in 2022, Ailton Krenak challenges the idea of the future as a simple race forward. In a 2023 analysis, Diego dos Santos Reis highlights the connections in Krenak’s work between childhood, ancestry, autonomy, and Earth, in contrast with permanent acceleration and a single idea of progress.

Antônio Bispo dos Santos, Nego Bispo, in The Earth Gives, the Earth Wants from 2023, also brings knowledge, community, ancestry, and territory into the same conversation.

And recent research inspired by Maya-Xinka Guatemalan thinker Lorena Cabnal shows how body and territory can be understood together. In 2024, Cristiane Coradin, Simone Oliveira, and Maria de los Angeles Arias Guevara discussed how different territorial conflicts produce different bodily, social, and environmental experiences.

BrainLatam expands this tradition by proposing the Body-Territory as the minimum unit of the State.

Not to replace the individual as a rights-bearing subject.

But to recognize something simple:

No one exists only as a taxpayer ID number.

There is health.

Education.

Family.

Water.

Food.

Housing.

Memory.

Language.

Mobility.

Environment.

Community.

Biome.

And all of these participate in the conditions under which a person is able to learn and make decisions.

Perhaps the problem is not too much knowledge. It is knowledge disconnected from life.

A child may learn percentages and still fail to understand a betting platform.

They may study statistics and still fail to recognize how a graph can manipulate perception.

They may use artificial intelligence without ever asking where an answer came from.

They may study biology without connecting it to contaminated water reaching their community.

They may memorize geography without understanding why they must cross an entire city to get to school.

Territory does not need to replace the curriculum.

It can become the doorway through which the curriculum gains meaning.

Percentages can explain betting.

Chemistry can investigate water.

Geography can study mobility.

Biology can begin with the local biome.

Financial mathematics can explain debt.

Computing can show how an algorithm chooses the next video.

Universal knowledge meets concrete experience.

While school teaches, other machines are teaching too

Brazil has already recognized that this dispute involves more than content.

The Digital Child and Adolescent Statute began restricting mechanisms capable of exploiting the vulnerabilities of children and adolescents, including infinite scrolling, autoplay, and certain reward triggers. ICL Notícias highlighted these changes and also reported that the government removed 937 influencer pages for irregular betting advertising between January 2025 and June 2026.

Brazil’s new National Education Plan for 2026–2036 also requires curricular updates addressing artificial intelligence, healthy use of digital technologies, and the effects of prolonged use of mobile phones, social networks, and electronic games. It also calls for transparency and data-protection guidelines for educational platforms and AI.

Internationally, the issue has become even more concrete. In August 2026, a bipartisan coalition of 29 US states took Meta to trial, alleging that Facebook and Instagram had been designed to encourage compulsive use among young people. Meta denies the allegations and disputes the causal connection asserted by the states. The case remains ongoing.

The question is no longer simply:

“Should mobile phones be allowed in school?”

It becomes:

Who is shaping our children’s attention?

From Science for Education to first-person consciousness

Brazil already has an initiative that we consider especially fertile.

The National Science for Education Network seeks to bring researchers, teachers, schools, and public policy closer together through translational research.

Roberto Lent, founder of the Science for Education Network and holder of the UNESCO Chair in Science for Education, described this approach in 2026 as a systematic connection between scientific production, public policy, and educational practice. The network also brings researchers and schoolteachers together around real questions involving literacy, attention, physiology, and new technologies.

Brazilian neuroscience itself has also begun to study learning as interaction. In 2023, Amanda Oku, Eneyse Pinheiro, Raimundo Soares Jr., and João Ricardo Sato, from UFABC, examined teacher-student interactions using fNIRS hyperscanning.

This does not mean that we can scan a brain and determine “who learned.”

Its value points elsewhere:

Learning can also be investigated as a relationship between people, rather than only as isolated processing inside one brain.

In a conversation reported by BrainLatam with Roberto Lent, we raised an extension of this logic. We do not attribute this proposal to Lent or institutionally to the Science for Education Network.

The question was:

If we are increasingly capable of producing data about a person, why should that knowledge not return primarily to the person themselves?

From this comes our proposal for a First-Person Consciousness AI.

A public AI for every Body-Territory

Imagine a child being born and receiving, together with their public digital identity, a protected artificial intelligence that could accompany them throughout life.

A kind of digital “Zé Gotinha” — not as a brand, but as a metaphor for something public, simple, universal, and recognizable.

The State would be responsible for organizing, integrating, safeguarding, and protecting the data.

Not a company.

Not a social network.

Not a private system that disappears when its business model changes.

The State safeguards. The person learns from what is safeguarded.

This AI could integrate, under different levels of confidentiality:

SUS health history,

medical examinations,

vaccinations,

school trajectory,

grades,

diplomas,

qualifications,

identity documents,

professional information,

territorial data,

and progressively, information produced by digital systems about that citizen.

Recent Brazilian research already shows why this question matters. In 2025, Siderly Almeida, Álvaro Martins Fernandes, and Daniel Maciel Martins Fernandes identified weaknesses in the regulation of AI and data protection in basic education, defending transparency, community participation, reviewability of automated decisions, and protection of cultural, linguistic, and cognitive diversity.

In 2023, Olira Saraiva Rodrigues and Karoline Santos Rodrigues had already argued that educational AI must be considered beyond technological enthusiasm, including critical development, creativity, and pedagogical consequences.

The six principles of First-Person Consciousness AI

1. Self-knowledge before classification.
Before a grade is used to compare a student with others, it can also help that student understand their own trajectory.

2. Public custody with strong confidentiality.
The State maintains the infrastructure and is responsible for security, integrity, continuity, and auditability. Custody does not mean every public agency can see everything.

3. The person does not receive an algorithmic destiny.
AI does not decide which profession, income, lifestyle, or metric defines success.

4. There are layers of authorization.
Some data are necessary for SUS, education, and other public services to fulfil their protective role. More sensitive information should require specific permissions within clearly defined legal limits.

5. Data is memory, not destiny.
A learning difficulty at age twelve must not become an identity for life. The Body-Territory changes.

6. The Right to Data Return.
Every piece of data collected, produced, or inferred about that Body-Territory that can lawfully be made available to the data subject should be capable of feeding their own AI.

This sixth principle may be the most transformative:

If an algorithm learned something about me by using my data, I should also be able to learn that about myself.

What if social networks returned what they learned about our attention?

Imagine a teenager opening their AI and seeing:

“Over the past eight weeks, your exposure to betting-related content has increased.”

It is not an accusation.

It is not a diagnosis.

It is a mirror.

The AI could ask:

Would you like to understand how the probabilities behind these bets work?

Mathematics meets life.

Or:

“You tend to abandon school activities after particular periods of digital use. Would you like to observe this relationship?”

It does not declare causation.

It asks.

That is the difference between an AI that stamps and an AI that helps consciousness observe itself.

UNESCO placed human agency at the center of its 2024 AI Competency Framework for Students: students should understand when and how to use AI, preserve human judgment, evaluate consequences, and retain responsibility.

A small window beyond education

The same principle could one day reach other democratic rights.

Today, the Brazilian vote is direct and secret. The electoral system is designed so that a citizen’s individual choice cannot be publicly linked to their identity.

But imagine, in a future constitutional architecture, voting by application combined with some form of revocable political mandate.

In BrainLatam’s conceptual model, a voting credential could be synchronized with a cryptographically protected area of the citizen’s First-Person AI without making their vote public and without allowing politicians, parties, ministries, or ordinary public officials to know whom that person supported.

The credential could belong to that Body-Territory and, under a future constitutional model, allow the citizen to maintain or withdraw political authorization.

That is not Brazil’s current electoral system.

It is only a small window showing where the principle could eventually lead:

Data organized and protected by the State, hidden from political power when secrecy is required, but useful first to the consciousness of the citizen themselves.

The center of this discussion, however, remains education.

The education of the future may begin with a first-person question

5D Consciousness is a BrainLatam conceptual proposal, not an established consensus within neuroscience.

It helps us ask:

What previous experiences are influencing my perception?

What knowledge am I missing?

What is capturing my attention?

How is my body participating?

Which relationships influence my decision?

Which territory makes this choice possible?

What consequences does it produce for other bodies and for the biome?

School today often asks:

“What is the correct answer?”

Perhaps the school of the future should also ask:

“How did you arrive at that answer?”

And:

“What evidence would make you change your mind?”

That is first-person consciousness.

It does not turn feelings into truth.

It does not abandon evidence.

Quite the opposite.

It gives a person more tools with which to confront their own perception.

Our children do not need to inherit our future already completed

When analyzing Lula, Flávio Bolsonaro, Zema, Caiado, Renan Santos, Augusto Cury, Clariana Barão, Edmilson Costa, Hertz Dias, Rui Costa Pimenta, Samara Martins, Wilson Grassi, or — when sufficient programmatic documentation exists — Pablo Marçal, perhaps we do not need to search for a candidate who already contains all these answers.

We can ask:

What should we preserve from this proposal?

What should we expand?

What can our Body-Territory perceive that this plan has not yet seen?

That is shared agency.

Because perhaps one of the greatest errors of colonial education was believing that one generation already knows the best destination for the next.

We can offer science.

Language.

Mathematics.

History.

Technology.

Memory.

Data.

Questions.

We can protect children from systems trying to capture their attention before they are able to understand what is happening.

We can build public infrastructure capable of preserving their trajectory.

But we should not attach a stamp saying:

“This is what you must become.”

Perhaps a genuinely decolonial education would say something different:

You arrived carrying a world.

Let us respect it.

Let us confront it with evidence.

Let us introduce you to other worlds.

Let us return to you the knowledge produced from your own trajectory.

And then:

Let us expand your consciousness so that you have greater freedom to decide in which Body-Territory and in which biome you want to live.

That may be the difference between educating someone to occupy a future we have already designed and educating them to participate in building a future we are not yet capable of imagining.

Post-2021 references

The Latin American foundation of this article includes Ramon Rodrigues Ramalho (2022) on Paulo Freire’s pedagogy; Ailton Krenak, Futuro Ancestral (2022) and Diego dos Santos Reis’s 2023 analysis; Antônio Bispo dos Santos, A terra dá, a terra quer (2023); Cristiane Coradin, Simone Oliveira, and Maria de los Angeles Arias Guevara (2024) in dialogue with Lorena Cabnal and Body-Territory; Iracema Santos do Nascimento and Juliana Froeder Alves Grilo (2026) on territorialized decolonial pedagogies; Roberto Lent and the National Science for Education Network in their 2022–2026 work on translational research; Amanda Oku, Eneyse Pinheiro, Raimundo Soares Jr., and João Ricardo Sato (2023) on neuroscience and educational interaction; Olira Saraiva Rodrigues and Karoline Santos Rodrigues (2023) on AI and education; and Siderly Almeida, Álvaro Martins Fernandes, and Daniel Maciel Martins Fernandes (2025) on AI, data protection, and diversity in Brazilian education.

Institutional references include Brazil’s 2026–2036 National Education Plan, the Digital Child and Adolescent Statute, the Superior Electoral Court, UNESCO, and current reporting from ICL Notícias and Reuters.

The concepts of Body-Territory as the minimum unit of the State, 5D Consciousness, First-Person Consciousness AI, the Right to Data Return, shared agency, and a possible future revocable electoral credential are BrainLatam conceptual proposals. They should not be attributed to the researchers or institutions cited above.