Frei Betto: 'We don't know where to hang our dreams'

Clarinha Glock

A school should be a laboratory for social inclusion, says Brazilian writer and liberation theologian Frei Betto, 'a laboratory in which the outcomes of this Forum become the ongoing work of education, of teaching our students that a different world is possible.'

At age 57, Betto is adviser to the Brazilian Union of Popular Movements, the Landless Rural Workers' Movement, and to a pastoral movement in Sao Paulo, and is currently engaged in a campaign - as a consultant - of the NGO Faça Parte (Take Part).

Under the motto of 'citizen education, action in solidarity', the campaign urges schools to open their doors to seek out the population in need and to serve as spaces for raising political awareness.

A follower of the ideas of his friend and educator, the late Paulo Freire, Betto presented the WSF participants with practical suggestions on how to put this approach into practice, which he said is defended by educators around the world.

If schools close their doors at the end of the school day, why not use them at night to teach adult literacy classes? If the schools remain closed Saturdays and Sundays, Betto suggests that they should be used on the weekends for conducting career training workshops, or to teach first-aid techniques and basic health care.

In schools that have large outdoor spaces, a community garden could be planted, or a community pharmacy set up, making use of the medications (that have not yet expired) that parents and teachers have in their homes but are not using.

The notion of a school for the citizenry implies a change in the current economic model, says Betto, pointing out that this would require agrarian and tax reform to prioritise local resources and to stop poor countries' capital from being sent abroad to pay the foreign debt.

The social inclusion Betto talks about presupposes that, before anything else, all children must have access to education.

'To achieve this, we cannot depend only on the government and its bolsa-escola (a small school stipend the Brazilian government gives families to encourage school attendance),' he says.

One alternative could be that parents, students and teachers make small regular contributions to ensure that a lower-income child has the wherewithal to attend class. Schools must transform themselves to take in people with disabilities, not out of pity, but in recognition of their rights as citizens, says Betto.

He proposes that schools should establish ties with social movements, abandoning the island of privileges and isolation in which many operate.

Betto stresses another problem that persists in education, what he calls 'de-historialisation', a word he coined to describe how neo-liberalism causes individuals to lose awareness of their place in time and in history.

Betto explains that those older than 45 lived in the literary era, while the younger generations are the children of the image era. 'All literature is intrinsically historic. A book has a beginning, middle and end, and generates mega-narratives.' But when the image dominates - television and film, for example -, times merge, muddling past, present and future.

This is also reflected from the pedagogical perspective. 'A person may only have professional, affective, political, personal projects if he or she has an idea of time as History, with the joys and difficulties which that path brings.' In the absence of life projects, any difficulty, which should be confronted as just another part of the process, comes to represent failure. In this context, the school tends to be a mere space for training the labour force.

It is precisely the era of the image that, in his opinion, explains why most students today are not able to follow the teacher's line of reasoning for even 40 minutes. They require visual impact, colour, sound - which are generally not found within the classroom.

Betto points out that television has become focussed less on culture and more on entertainment. Culture feeds the spirit and the soul, while entertainment hypnotises the senses, and does not provide the means for growth. 'The critical issue is that the school continues to - and should - work with texts. But the image question has not yet been introduced into the classroom.'

His proposal is to take the debate on image to the schools, encouraging students to study the discourse of advertising, for example, so they can develop a critical eye towards that medium.

It would be one way of raising awareness about how neo-liberalism is able to motivate consumerism, creating necessity out of the superfluous, he said.

The theologian criticises the lack of a more holistic vision of education. He believes the school should serve as a place for speaking openly, without taboos, about the serious life situations that everyone experiences - pain, death, failure, racism, sexism - but also as a place to learn the practical lessons needed for daily life.

It should be a space, most importantly, to educate the students in political - but not party-based - development, he adds.

'We have values, principles and dreams, but we don't know where to hang them because the schools do not take political life into account, they are not a space in which young people learn to enjoy politics,' says Betto. 'If the majority is disgusted by it, we face the end of democracy.'