Rhetoric of Dissent and Public Policies: a critical analysis of the controversy surrounding the “Future-se” Program (2019) on social media

This article aims to critically analyze the repercussions on social media surrounding the “Future-se” Program, created by the Ministry of Education (MEC) in 2019, based on Ruth Amossy’s (2017) contributions to the rhetoric of dissent. From the publication of the launch of the Program on MEC’s social media, ten comments were extracted for subsequent critical realist analysis of the discourse (Riley et al, 2007), according to the defining categories of the controversy as an argumentative modality: the dichotomization of arguments, the polarization of groups, and the disqualification of arguments and actors involved. All authors were anonymized, under current ethical precepts, according to their social roles in the controversy – proponent and opponent –, in an attempt to illustrate the positions implied therein. Thus, we hope to contribute to discussions that may have repercussions on different levels of public policies on Brazilian Education, in the present and the future.