Digital Education and Citizenship: Contributions of Public Schools to the Formation of Subjects of Law

The growing insertion of corporate technologies in public education systems has reconfigured pedagogical dynamics, demanding a rigorous analysis of the impacts of these tools on student formation. In the face of the expansion of algorithmic control and the datafication of society, this article aimed to understand how public schools can act to mediate the transition of students historically positioned by platforms as mere users and consumers into authentic subjects of rights within the digital ecosystem. To achieve this purpose, the investigation was grounded in qualitative research, structured as a literature review and document analysis. Contemporary theoretical frameworks debating surveillance capitalism and the phenomenon of the platformization of education were explored. Subsequently, the theoretical data was crossed with the legal precepts of the Statute of the Child and Adolescent (ECA) and the General Data Protection Law (LGPD). The study evidenced that digital ecosystems frequently impose a mercantile logic that threatens teaching autonomy and captures student privacy. It was found that educational policies based exclusively on the promotion of instrumental digital literacy proved insufficient to emancipate the individual. Therefore, it was concluded that building a critical digital citizenship demanded strengthening the school as an ethical filter of resistance. The school institution consolidated itself as the primordial territory to submit technological infrastructures to the guarantee of rights, pointing to the urgency of formulating sovereign pedagogical protocols that protect the best interest of children and adolescents against digital monopolies.