BRAZIL: Keeping Schools Open on Weekends, an Antidote to Violence

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 3 2003 (IPS) - Keeping schools open over the weekends to provide recreational spaces and offer cultural and sports activities has significantly reduced acts of violence and vandalism by students in two Brazilian states.

That is the conclusion reached by an assessment of ”Making Room: Education and Culture for Peace” (Abrindo Espaços in Portuguese), a programme that began to take shape in the northeastern state of Pernambuco and the southern state of Rio de Janeiro in 2000, with United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) cooperation.

Sociologists Julio Jacobo Waiselfisz and María Maciel carried out an evaluation of the results of the programme in 240 primary and secondary schools in Pernambuco and 208 in Rio de Janeiro in the earlier half of 2002. Their findings were published last month in the book ”Reverting Violence, Sowing Futures”.

In Pernambuco, located in Brazil’s impoverished northeast, the number of violent incidents fell 54 percent in schools that have been participating in the project since 2000, and 35 percent in those that have taken part since 2001.

In participating schools in Rio de Janeiro, the number of violent incidents fell around 30 percent a year in 2000 and 2001.

”Few preventive programmes achieve such a high level of effectiveness in such a short period of time,” Waiselfisz, an Argentine national who has lived in Brazil for nearly three decades and is currently coordinator of the UNESCO office in Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, told IPS.

Initiatives that focus on prevention generally require relatively long periods of time before they begin to bear fruit, but in this case, two years were enough to bring ”significant results,” he said.

The schools taking part in the programme become cultural, sports and skills training centres on Saturdays and Sundays.

Theatre, dance, music, arts, football, basketball and other sports, as well as chess, computer, crafts and cooking courses are some of the activities in which students and other people from the local communities are involved.

Relationships among students, and between students and teachers, soon improve, and ”positive internal networks” form, bringing about ”pacification” and better discipline which, according to school principals, has boosted academic performance, said Waiselfisz.

Acts of violence that have been on the rise in Brazilian schools in recent decades, like knife fights, assaults, armed robberies, rapes and suicides, have decreased in the schools that joined the programme.

Things have also calmed down in the surrounding communities, reflected in a decline in petty theft and other misdemeanours, and in vandalism and theft in the schools themselves, where drug consumption has also decreased.

When the students’ families and others begin to take part in the weekend activities, the relationship between the local communities and the schools also changes, said Waiselfisz.

But, he added, the programme cannot ”confront the power of drug traffickers” and other forms of organised crime. Some favelas or shantytowns in Rio de Janeiro, for example, are basically ruled by drug gangs.

Nevertheless, he said that ”perhaps (the programme) might have an influence (against crime) in the longer-term.”

Violence in the schools ”is a mirror of what goes on outside,” although it takes a different shape, with less theft of property and more interpersonal violence, said Waiselfisz. The number of sexual assaults, for example, is ”two or three times” higher in the schools than in the surrounding communities, he pointed out.

The Colegio Estadual Guadalajara, a public primary and secondary school that provides two day and one night shift of classes to 2,000 students from neighbourhoods with high levels of violent crime in Duque de Caxías, a city of 700,000 on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, has designed a similar programme.

In 1996, the school hired ”cultural orientators” who organise activities in theatre, dance, music and sports, with the aim of ”keeping kids out of the crime” that plagues their neighbourhoods, history teacher Helenita Bezerra explained to IPS.

A cultural production group was created, as well as a ”school for parents”, which offers workshops in crafts and job training courses. A football team was set up, and a project on environmental education is coordinated by Bezerra. The activities are carried out Monday through Saturday.

It was the school’s own policy, rather than guidelines handed down by the state government, that gave rise to the programme, which is independent of the ”Making Room” initiative, said Bezerra.

”There has been a great improvement in the relationship between the students and the school, which is no longer the target of frequent robberies,” she underlined. Now ”the students are proud to represent their school, they take care of it, and on Saturdays it belongs to the community.”