The Ministry of Education (MEC) celebrates this Tuesday, April 23rd, World Book and Copyright Day. The date was chosen by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco), in 1995, to celebrate the book, encourage reading, honor authors and reflect on their legal rights.
The MEC, through the National Book and Teaching Material Program (PNLD), invested around R$2.1 billion in 2024. The value is 79% higher than the investment for the 2023 school year, according to a survey by the National Education Development Fund (FNDE), an agency linked to the MEC that takes care of the program. For the 2024 academic year, the program distributed 194.6 million copies, in order to serve more than 31 million students.
For the Secretary of Basic Education (SEB), Kátia Schweickardt, the National Book and Teaching Material Program is an equitable policy. “The PNLD goes everywhere, reaching the interior of Brazil, the forests, the fields and the centers of large cities. There are more than 85 years of history built in different periods by different agents”, she concluded.
According to the general coordinator of Books and Teaching Materials at MEC, Raphaella Cantarino, “Brazil has one of the largest book and teaching material distribution programs for public schools in the world, second only to China”.
Pedagogical assessment – Teachers from all over the country, from public and private schools, can register to be part of the pedagogical evaluation teams for books submitted to the National Book and Teaching Material Program (PNLD). Registrations can be made throughout the year by the PNLD platform Assessment.
The PNLD is an action of the MEC, coordinated between the FNDE and SEB. The path for books to reach students begins with the creation of a notice, which goes through a public hearing to guarantee a democratic process. Once the notice is approved and published, publishers produce the materials that will be submitted and which will undergo pedagogical evaluation, in an action coordinated by SEB. This analysis lasts between four and six months and is made up of teams of teachers from different regions of Brazil, selected from those registered on the PNLD Assessment Platform.
After completing the evaluation process, the works approved by the FNDE are approved. The choice of material to be adopted is made by the education networks, with the following possibilities: for each school; and for each group of schools or for all schools in the network, as recommended by Decree No. 9099/2017, which provides for the PNLD.
Notices – At the moment, the notices for the PNLD Early Childhood Education and PNLD Secondary Education are in the development phase and will be published in 2024. On March 28th, the hearing that dealt with the PNLD Early Childhood Education took place, while the PNLD Secondary Education was held on the same day. April 1st. The cycle foresees that the books will reach students in 2026 and the hearings can be watched in full on the channel FNDE no YouTube.
The PNLD Youth and Adult Education (EJA) notice was launched in December 2023 and the teaching material is expected to reach students in 2025. At the moment, publishers are in the production phase of the books that will be submitted and evaluated.
Still in 2024, it is planned to publish a notice focusing on literary works to be distributed in 2026.
MEC Social Communication Advisory, with information from SEB