For seven years, homeschooling in Brazil has lived in a constitutional half-light: not forbidden, not authorized, and not regulated. In 2018 the country's Supreme Court held that educating children at home does not breach the Constitution, but it left the practice unusable until Congress passed a law to govern it — a law that still does not exist. A criminal court in the interior of São Paulo state has now filled that silence with a verdict, and the result is the first case of its kind in the country.
Pun
The defendants are Adauto and Ieda Denardi, a couple from Jales who withdrew their two daughters from school during the pandemic and taught them at home instead. In late April a judge convicted the pair of "intellectual neglect" — an offense aimed at parents who deny a child basic schooling — and sentenced them to 50 days of detention. What had until then been treated as a paperwork failure, a matter of not enrolling children in a recognized institution, became, in their case, a crime. The legal group ADF International, which is backing the family, says no Brazilian parents had ever before been criminally punished for home education.
The conviction is striking less for its severity than for how much contrary evidence the court set aside. State prosecutors, after weighing the girls' academic and social progress, asked the judge to acquit. An independent educational psychologist found no neglect. The parents filed some 3,000 pages of records, and the daughters — 11 and 15 — were documented reading roughly 30 books a year and studying Latin, English, piano and music theory. The judge ruled against them regardless, faulting the home curriculum for omitting state-sanctioned instruction on gender, sexuality and cultural diversity, and treating the girls' lack of interest in popular Brazilian music genres as proof of cultural gaps. In his written reasoning he framed home education as depriving the children of contact with differing worldviews — and accused the parents of advancing an ideological agenda through their daughters.
Not everyone reads the case as overreach. Defenders of Brazil's compulsory-enrollment rule argue that registration in a recognized school is a safeguard, not a formality: it allows the state to monitor a child's progress, verify socialization and ensure a common curriculum is actually delivered — protections, they contend, that vanish when education happens entirely behind closed doors. That is the position lawmakers opposed to the stalled reform bill have pressed in Brasília, and it is the logic the sentencing judge invoked.
For now, no one is going to prison. The Denardis are appealing to the Seventh Criminal Chamber of the São Paulo State Court of Justice, and their sentence is suspended while that challenge proceeds. The suspension, however, comes with strings: their lawyer, Isabelle Monteiro of the National Association for Home Education, has noted that the conditional terms — years of monthly obligations, community service and mandatory school enrollment, with the jail term revived on any breach — may bind the family more tightly than the original 50 days.
The dispute has since moved from the courtroom to the legislature. The Denardis testified at congressional hearings in June, pressing lawmakers with a blunt question — is educating our children a crime? A homeschooling bill cleared Brazil's lower house in 2022 but has stalled in the Senate, leaving an estimated 70,000-plus home-educated children — CBN cites closer to 75,000 families — in the same limbo that produced the Denardi verdict.
That tension between parental conviction and state authority is not unique to Brazil. In Germany, where homeschooling has been effectively prohibited since 1918, Dirk and Petra Wunderlich had their four children removed by police in a 2013 raid and fought for years through German and European courts to recover custody. Elsewhere the penalty has fallen more heavily on belief itself: Amnesty International documented an Iranian pastor and his wife, Victor Bet-Tamraz and Shamiram Issavi, sentenced over their Christian activity, and the converts Nayereh Arjaneh and Qasem Esmaili were jailed after their 2025 arrest, with her five-year term beginning in December. Such cases do not always end in confinement — the Iranian couple Sara Ahmadi and Homayoun Zhaveh were acquitted and freed on appeal — which is precisely the reversal the Denardis are now seeking.
Whether São Paulo's appeals court treats the conviction as a misfire or a precedent will matter well beyond one household in Jales. Until Brazil's Senate acts, the line between a parenting choice and a criminal act remains, for tens of thousands of families, a question no statute answers.
