EDUCATION-BRAZIL: ‘Indigenous Schools’ – a Lesson for the World

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 20 2000 (IPS) - The model under which bilingual, multicultural indigenous schools operate in Brazil’s Amazon jungle region could provide lessons for the world with respect to incorporating intercultural concepts and respect for differences, according to the organisers of the project.

Not only are the new schools bilingual, but the students and teachers themselves are transcribing languages and producing the first books ever written in many of the native tongues.

That activity and others have turned teachers and students into researchers, the authors of their own textbooks and learning tools.

“They carry out a lot of research, recording traditions, myths, and natural sciences and resources,” said Nietta Lindenberg Monte, who for the past 20 years has been training indigenous teachers in the northwestern state of Acre, in the Amazon jungle, through the non-governmental Pro-Indian Commission (CPI).

The results of that work by teachers and students are being catalogued in the Indigenous Geographical Atlas of Acre, produced with support from the CPI, and videos, including one that registers 60 different species of bees in one local area, said Lindenberg Monte, an educator and sociolinguist who lives in Rio de Janeiro and frequently crisscrosses the country in her work.

The students, who range in age from five to over 50, are all “workers” in their cultures, because indigenous people begin at an early age to participate in productive family life and rites and rituals. That demands great flexibility in the school-year calendar and organisation of the different grades.

The National Curricular Reference, a book of guidelines approved by the education ministry in 1998 after a process coordinated by Lindenberg Monte, in which native groups participated widely, recognises that schools are not the only place of learning, because indigenous societies have their own mechanisms of socialisation and transmission of knowledge.

Through hands-on practice, children learn skills in farming, forestry, hunting and fishing — extracurricular arenas of learning in which students can reflect on their activities and associate them with other areas of knowledge.

For that reason, class-time in indigenous schools was set at a minimum of 500 hours a year, compared to 800 hours for conventional “Western” schools, Lindenberg Monte explained.

In the state of Acre, schools generally hold class three days a week. But according to the guidelines, each native school is to set its own schedules and design its own calendars, based on local needs.

For example, vacations must coincide with harvest and planting- time, when the entire community shares in the work.

Indigenous education is “led by the community, according to its projects, conceptions and principles,” states the National Curricular Reference. Decisions on the curriculum, the school-year calendar, methods, objectives and content are reached by the community itself.

The new focus subverts the traditional orientation of an educational system whose byword has been homogeneity, and which has denied self-determination and cultural and ethnic diversity in line with a policy of integrating indigenous peoples into Brazil’s mainstream, European-dominated society.

The changes began to be seen in the 1970s, when human rights organisations and other groups mobilised in support of native peoples, and indigenous communities began to organise themselves.

The Brazilian constitution, which dates back to 1988, recognises the rights of indigenous groups to their “ancestral” land and their forms of “social organisation, customs, languages, beliefs and traditions.”

Recognition of the multicultural nature of Brazilian society and the value of diversity was incorporated by the educational system, until specifically indigenous schools were admitted, and their national guidelines drawn up in 1998 based on the experiences of a number of existing schools, such as the CPI project in the state of Acre.

These schools provide “a lesson for the world because they denude the false idea” of homogeneity which generally governs educational systems, said anthropologist Betty Mindlin, the head of Sao Paulo’s Institute of Anthropology and the Environment.

“The ideal is for all schools to be different,” she said.

The acceptance of bilingual education in itself is already a major stride forward, considering the fact that there are still restrictions on cultural diversity as expressed in “dialects” or “dominated” languages in developed countries, said Mindlin. She pointed out, for example, that until just two decades ago, the United States banned teaching in native languages.

But the ultimate aim of multicultural education remains a distant goal that runs up against hurdles such as the need to transcribe oral-based knowledge in most native languages, said Mindlin, who has written books on the cultures of indigenous communities with whom she works in the Amazon jungle states of Mato Grosso and Rondonia.

Brazil, a country of over 163 million, is home to around 330,000 indigenous people belonging to 210 different ethnic groups who speak 170 languages. When the Portuguese first arrived in 1500, there were an estimated five million Indians living in what is now Brazil.

The country has some 2,500 indigenous teachers, 70 percent of whom were trained under the new guidelines, said Ivete Madeira Campos, the education ministry’s general coordinator of support for indigenous schools.

However, not all of them have bilingual teaching tools, because the material is still being produced in the teacher training courses.

Primary education in Brazil is first and foremost the responsibility of municipal governments, although in some cases it falls directly under the jurisdiction of state authorities. For that reason, the education ministry does not run the native schools, but merely provides guidelines.

Training indigenous teachers is one of the biggest challenges, given the varied backgrounds of prospective educators, some of whom have no secondary school education, while others are still completing high school, said Madeira Campos.

The ideal is for the teachers to belong to the communities where they teach, due to their familiarity with the local language and culture. However, they must also have some contact with “Western schooling,” the universal or dominant model of education, she explained.

Indigenous people themselves demand intercultural education, saying they need to learn Portuguese and math skills in order not to be “cheated” when selling their products in the “white” people’s market, and because they are interested in a “dialogue with the other world,” said Lindenberg Monte.