BRAZIL: Small Town Revolutionises Learning with Poetry

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 27 1997 (IPS) - A small town surrounded by sugar cane has opened a new path for Brazil’s discredited education system, for poetry has become all the rage in Dois Corregos, improving the schooling and everyone’s self-esteem.

More than 3,000 pupils in the seven local state schools have started writing poetry in this town of 20,000 people, 270 km from Sao Paulo.

Since then the children’s use of the Portuguese language has improved markedly, with nearly everyone picking up on the idea, regional education officer Aguinaldo dos Santos reported.

All this is a country where barely one percent of students complete secondary education capable of expressing ideas correctly and interpret complex texts, said the Ministry of Education.

Teachers of other disciplines have seen the knock on effects in their areas.

In the last listing of the 6,000 schools in the state of Sao Paulo, two from Dois Corregos are listed amongst the top 100, much to the pride of Jose Eduardo Mendes Camargo, owner of the Santa Adelaide sugar plant, the core of 75 percent of the local economy.

The “Dream Factory,” project, which spread the habit of poetry writing in the schools, was his idea, for while he graduated in business administration he is an amateur poet. The programme has included nearly all the town’s teachers over the last year and a half.

This experiment, backed by funding from Camargo himself, has earned certain fame and awoken the interest of other towns both near at hand and further away. The idea of “exporting” the project led the entrepreneur to create the Dream Factory Institute, which will deal with the project in a self-sufficient manner from 1997 onwards, according to his plans.

Mayors, school directors and company owners from other towns are now calling for training to convert their teachers and officials into poetry promotors.

“The schools were the first step. Now we will broaden the project to the community,” including marginalised people, senior citizens, workers and other sectors, he announced.

Camargo told IPS he first had the idea when he was thinking how to train the human resources of his company better, and how to improve their quality of life. But the process showed him an effective advance depends on the cultural development of the whole community: “the entire town has to develop,” he said.

Based both on this concept and the experience of his wife, who introduced philosophy into primary education with good results, Camargo saw poetry as a “fantastic” instrument to shake up the provincialism of the town.

Poetry can “change people’s lives, so they can see things with greater comprehension and pleasure,” he said.

Inside the school, poetry “creates an opening for liberty” and “allows the children to express the events of their own lives, feelings and knowledge with pleasure,” said Maria de Graca Mendes Abreu, one of the project coordinators.

“One eight-year-old girl told me she adores poetry, because ugly things can be made pretty there,” said Abreu. This particular little girl wrote a poem about the callouses which she developed on her hands during the coffee harvest. “It is a form of catharsis,” she added.

The “Dream Factory” has dynamised the movement with a weekly publication, whereby “the poorest parents come to believe in the ability of their children when they see their poems published,” said Abreu.

The project has also led to cultural fairs and murals with poetry in various locations and public buildings around the town, as well as the specified classes, she explained.

With the self-esteem and confidence the children gain in expressing themselves, there is no place left for illiteracy, she said.

Abreu herself is a classics graduate and an active campaigner for innovative education, claiming that a liking for reading and writing leads to a good all round educational performance.

At present, the “Dream Factory” is producing teaching materials for a course in ten workshops, which will allow for 78 teachers from Dois Corregos to deepen and disseminate the experience.

In 1998, the town will hold a meeting for poets from all around the world, “with many leading names, mostly Latin Americans,” similar to the festival held in Medellin, Colombia each year, said Camargo.

The international contacts of the tiny Dois Corregos has already started, for it recently ‘twinned’ with Santa Fe, in Argentina – a city which is planning its own “Dream Factory” for the near future. (FIN/IPS/tra-so/mo/mj/sm/97)