The public policies of textbook in Brazil: publications of the PNLD of Biology in question

ABSTRACT The textbook is a resource resulting from a multiple determinations process and is part of the history of Brazilian education. In this sense, this article characterizes the Brazilian public policies towards textbooks, establishing relations between the extra-scholastic events linked to politics and the textbook market and their implications in the context of Biology as a school subject. In this context, we seek to understand the details of the Programa Nacional do Livro Didático (PNLD) [National Program of the Textbook], especially for Biology, to explain the conjunctures that demarcate the Program. Having as the theoretical and methodological basis the dialectic logic, we analyzed the Biology PNLD in its totality-particularity relations, with the social-historical contexts of education, through documentary and exploratory analysis. We conclude that the way this public policy is conducted has favored the formation of oligopolies for teaching that expands the profitability of large business groups, which stigmatizes the textbook as a commodity.