Impact of Philosophy and Sociology Teaching on School Performance: An Analysis of the School Census Microdata from the National Institute for Educational Studies and Research (INEP)

Resumo

The new Provisional Measure 746/2016, removing the compulsory nature of the disciplines of Philosophy and Sociology in the secondary school curriculum, resulted in heated controversies among scholars and massive mobilisations of students across the country against their taking out from High School. The objective of this work was to identify the effect of the presence or not of the disciplines Philosophy and Sociology in the High School curriculum on the students' learning. In terms of methodology, data from the Census of Basic Education 2015 and from the averaged per school performances in the ENEM 2015 were examined by means of several Data Science techniques more specifically, with the resources of the language R. The results of the analysis did not indicate any perceptible influence of the disciplines Philosophy and Sociology on the performance, unlike the Indicator of Student’s Socioeconomic Status and the Administrative Dependence of the School. These results seem to contradict the significant positive ones obtained after activities conducted by teachers trained in investigative philosophical dialogue in the classroom. Far from taking sides in the discussion about the pertinence of the inclusion of these disciplines in High School, what was sought here was to point out the need for a rethink about how they should be organised.