Paulo Marinho (CIIE/FPCEUP) delivered the opening lecture at the IV Colóquio Internacional Aprendizados ao Longo da Vida [IV International Colloquium on Lifelong Learning] (State University of Rio de Janeiro – UERJ, Brazil, November 17-19), entitled “The Right to Education and Human Dignity: Reading the World, Producing Knowledge, Writing History – So that No One Has to Apologize for Knowing What They Know.” Based on his experience in collaborative research in indigenous and quilombola schools, peripheral contexts, and experiences at various levels and modalities of education in Brazil, he discussed how educational systems continue to produce epistemicide and internal-external coloniality, silencing the knowledge, languages, practices, and memories of historically marginalized groups.

The conference highlighted the curriculum as a technology of power and, simultaneously, as a territory of re-existence, showing, through empirical cases, how the same curriculum can either destroy knowledge or make it the center of an emancipatory educational project. Within this framework, it critically analyzed the place of norms and the BNCC (National Common Core Curriculum), denouncing the risk of standardizations that reinforce hegemonies, but also pointing to counter-hegemonic possibilities – reading the BNCC critically, using it as a foundation and not a ceiling, and opening spaces for the inclusion of indigenous, quilombola (Afro-Brazilian), peripheral, and youth and adult knowledge.

Another strong theme of the intervention was community agency and cognitive democracy, arguing that there is no educational transformation without the leading role of communities, movements, and individuals in defining what counts as knowledge. By proposing education as the production of possible futures, it called on the audience to think about curricula that do not merely reproduce the existing world, but that invent other ways of living together. The conference was received with great enthusiasm, reinforcing the presence of CIIE/FPCEUP in international debates on education, social justice, human dignity, and decoloniality, particularly with countries of the Global South.