Will Brazil Follow the Japanese Educational Reforms and Cut the Funding for Research in Humanities? Possibilities and Psycho-political Implications

On May 2019 Brazilian Federal government declared it would follow the Japanese academic model, cutting funding for undergraduate and graduate-level programs and research on Humanities and Social Sciences. The cited reforms were implemented by Japanese Education Minister Shimomura in 2015, but Japan would later back down on these cuts. In Brazil, however, the cuts affect 30% of the budget for Federal educational institutions and frozen the continuity of the most important program from the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), which distributed grants for researchers on graduate programs. This paper conducts a literature and bibliographic review in order to debate the Brazilian’s cuts on Higher Education. It is concluded that those cuts are mainly politically motivated, affecting mostly the hard sciences instead of Humanities and Social Sciences. It is also concluded the political motivations behind the slashing of funding for Education may backfire, fostering the actual and new forms of political associativism between Brazilian students and researchers.