A tutela jurisdicional do direito prestacional à educação: ensino fundamental regular em ação civil pública no Brasil

Abstract

Nowadays there is much talk of the (in)efficiency of the judicial process in ensuring the consummation of fundamental rights incumbent on the State, such as the right to education, defined in the republic s constitution as a public subjective right at the level of basic education. Actual practice, as a result of the action of the Department for the Defence of Education of the Capital (Public Prosecution Service of Pernambuco), has shown that a civil public action, a judicial instrument for the protection of diffuse and collective rights, has not made possible the actual implementation of the fundamental right to education (provision of regular basic education by the State), as provided for in Brazil s juridical order. The fact is that the provision of regular basic education presupposes not only satisfying the demand for places in the public school system (quantitative aspect), but also the guarantee of minimum standards of quality of teaching (qualitative aspect), which involves the State making available the goods and services indispensable for meeting the educational needs and, as a result, the outlay of public resources. The judicial decision obtained in a civil public action (compelling the Treasury to comply with its obligation to provide regular basic education) does not satisfy the educational needs formally set out in Brazil s constitution by virtue of the political constraint on executing a such a decision against the Treasury, only executable in the form of a cash payment and, in addition, by virtue of the legal linkage of the appropriations to special funds established in law. Such a judicial decision is monetized, being the result of a cash payment execution, whereas the educational provision, intended to meet the educational needs, only satisfied by means of concrete provisions (educational goods and services), and therefore not linked to the judicial system, but to the economic one, in the setting of which the administration of scarce resources for the purpose of satisfying the needs to be met with public funds requires that the proposed expenditure be included in the State s budget. The failure to execute the constitutional right to education is the subject of this study, the problem being addressed by means of the dialectic hermeneutical method, which permits an understanding of the connection between the judicial and the economic systems, thereby making feasible the proposition of an efficiency route to the implementation of the fundamental right to education