POR QUE ESCOLA?
Veronica Pinheiro
02 de setembro de 2024
"Miss V.'s doll is prettier because she's been playing with clay for longer".
José, 7 years old
Last week my father asked me why I always end up going back to work at schools. We had coffee in the late afternoon. I tried to tell him what I'm going to try to tell you here.
The school has become the main agency for human (de-/con-)formation in Brazil: as an arm of the State, it is present in peripheries, hamlets and quilombos. There were 47.3 million children and adolescents enrolled in schools in the country in 2023, according to the School Census. Dialogue with basic education is urgent, since more than twenty percent of Brazil's total population is linked to a school unit. It becomes even more urgent because the school population is composed of the most vulnerable layer of society: children. And this dialogue is not exclusive to parents and educators. Economists, artists, physicists, astronomers, musicians... all of society should be committed to the future of education and childhood. Children are the most vulnerable to climate crises and all existing social crises. Changing the course of our country's childhoods is the only way to make the future possible.
There's a proverb that says:
“Nós não herdamos o mundo de nossos antepassados, nós o pegamos emprestado dos nossos filhos.”¹
Textbooks still talk about hydroelectric power without mentioning the impacts caused by hydroelectric plants on life. I always remember Ailton Krenak saying that nature is not ‘a natural resource’, a storehouse from which we take things. This information needs to reach schools. Adults, as entities of nature, need to weave dialogues with children. A dialogue between living beings. The colonialist system is at the service of a structured, universalist, oppressive way of thinking, and it knows exactly what it's doing. It has no interest in creating real prospects for the future. The State which regulates education in Brazil is the same State which knows that every 24 hours 320 children and adolescents are sexually exploited in the country. The State at the service of colonialism is dead. It's our duty, as living people, to weave dialogues about life. Structures serve agendas; schools serve people. And because it serves people directly, it needs life.
We, who have been playing around here for longer, can and should share with children possible ways to build ‘dolls’ and futures. I read in an education magazine that, in the United States, the same architects who designed prisons designed schools. The schools I studied in could easily have been used as locations for films set in prisons: they had high walls, bars on staircases, bars in corridors and bars in pavilions. We called the annex to the building where I went to secondary school ‘Carandiru’.
In Brazil, only 34.5 per cent of municipal schools have a green area². The schools are pure cement; no natural light; no natural ventilation. If we follow the logic of 7-year-old José's thinking, architects, people who have been playing at designing for a long time, could design more beautiful schools and propose to institutions, in a technical way, projects that respect children's lives and nature. An architecture for the sake of good living for children and the school community. Bringing up the green, the trees, activating and awakening memories is work for a whole community. One teacher with 35 children can't break cement to plant a tree. That's why I went back to school with the Selvagem Ways of Knowing Group. I went back with a community.
We're still discussing things that should already be being practised. Those of us who have been playing here for longer have this habit of discussing things instead of practising them. It's a habit of those who have been schooled by colonialism.
Colonialism distributes people into age groups, segregates them and says that schools are for teachers and pupils. If we borrow the world from our children, and they are at school, that's where we should be too, learning from those who lent it to us, learning how to give back what we borrowed. Being together in confluence with children shouldn't be a metaphor. Interaction and reciprocity are present in all natural phenomena. Contact is necessary for the maintenance of life. We live because life has a sensitive and super elaborate web of contact and co-operation³.
At this point, we unite Nego Bispo's thinking with that of the boy José: if life is circular and it thrives with sharing, the experience converges in the condition of support for the grandchildren's generation.
To summarise the answer, I can hope that the hand that trains also teaches to be free.
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¹ A proverb credited to indigenous people from what we now call North America.
² Dependência física existente à escola. Área verde, espaço de domínio escolar dotado de vegetação ou gramado, livre de impermeabilização, que desempenhe função educativa, ecológica, paisagística ou recreativa, propiciando a melhoria da qualidade estética, funcional e ambiental da escola, sendo recomendado seu uso pedagógico com o desenvolvimento de projetos de educação ambiental, como horta, jardim, pomar, viveiro de mudas de planta e canteiros ornamentais.
³“…a simbiose é ‘simplesmente a convivência com contato físico de organismos de espécies diferentes. Parceiros na simbiose, companheiros na simbiontes subsistem literalmente tocando um ao outro ou mesmo um dentro do outro, no mesmo lugar e no mesmo tempo.”
Margulis, Lynn. Symbiotic Planet – um novo olhar para a evolução. Rio de Janeiro: Dantes Editora, 2022.