Education of the countryside at a crossroads: rural social movements and national policy reform in Brazil

Abstract

This contribution explores the strategies used by popular movements seeking to advance social reforms, and the challenges once they succeed. It analyzes how a strategic alliance between the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) and the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (CONTAG) transformed the Ministry of Education's official approach to rural schooling. This success illustrates the critical role of international allies, political openings, framing, coalitions and state–society alliances in national policy reforms. The paper also shows that once movements succeed in advancing social reforms, bureaucratic tendencies such as internal hierarchy, rapid expansion and ‘best practices’ – in addition to the constant threat of cooptation – can prevent their implementation.

Keywords:

• education of the countryside
• MST
• CONTAG
• state-society interactions
• national advocacy

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my committee, Harley Shaiken, Peter Evans, Michael Watts, Zeus Leonardo and Erin Murphy-Graham, for commenting on previous versions of this paper. Multiple colleagues have also given me feedback, including Ellen Moore, Chela Delgado, Nirali Jani, Kimberly Vinall, Alex V. Barnard, Gabriel Hetland, Rasjesh Veeraraghavan, Edwin Ackerman, Krystal Strong, Jon K. Shelton, Khalil Johnson, Robert Gross and Laura Enriquez's Latin American Writing Group.

Notes

¹Informal conversation with Edson Anhaia, 12 February 2014.

²This vignette comes from participant observation in this protest.

³The Institute of Education Josué de Castro (IEJC), also informally known as ITERRA.

⁴Interview with Maria Rebeca Otera Gomes, 24 February 2014 (via Skype). 

⁵Interview, Edgar Kolling, 18 November 2010.

⁶PRONERA was put in the Ministry of Agriculture Development, and has had a very different institutional trajectory than the programs in the Ministry of Education.

⁷All of these organizations and institutions are listed in the final conference document.

⁸Maybury-Lewis (1994, 56) groups rural workers historically connected to CONTAG into three groups: small holders and sharecroppers (people with modest access to land they use to plan subsistence and cash crops), wage workers (with no autonomous control over land) and posseiros (homesteaders or squatters).

⁹However, CONTAG's choice to occupy land is not necessarily in contradiction to its historical tendency to ‘follow the law’, as occupations are generally conducted on land that is arguably subject to the land reform law. Therefore, CONTAG can be seen as promoting one dimension of the rule of law.

¹⁰Interview with Sonia Santos, 2 March 2011.

¹¹The first two coordinators of the Educação do Campo within CONTAG also confirm that the PADRSS proposal solidified the importance of public education (Costa Lunas and Novaes Rocha n.d.).

¹² Conselho Nacional da Educação/Câmara da Educação Básica (CNE/CEB).

¹³Edla Soarez went to every state to collect data for these guidelines, and she also admits it was difficult to convince MST activists to be part of this process. Interview with Edla Soarez, 6 April 2011.

¹⁴Interview, Antonio Munarim, 28 November 2011.

¹⁵These groups are all listed on the conference's official final document.

¹⁶Interview, Antonio Munarim, 28 November 2011.

¹⁷Interview, Armênio Bello Schmidt, 10 November 2010.

¹⁸Interview, Edgar Kolling, 18 November 2010.

¹⁹Interview with Antonio Munarim, 28 November 2011.

²⁰Antonio Munarim emailed the author a copy of this letter.

²¹Interview, Monica Molina, 10 November 2010.

²²Interview, Antonio Munarim, 28 November 2011; Luiz Antonio Pasquetti, 17 November 2011.

²³Interview, Vanderlúcia Simplicio, 9 November 2010.

²⁴Interview, Armênio Bello Schmidt, 10 November 2010.

²⁵Interview, Armênio Bello Schmidt, 10 November 2010.

²⁶These protests eventually resulted in the termination of Escola Ativa in 2012. It was replaced with a program called ‘Escolas da Terra’ (Interview with Edson Marcos Anhaia, 7 February 2014).

²⁸Figure 1 was created by the author, using the Comissão Pastoral da Terra (CPT) database on rural mobilizations (http://www.cptnacional.org.br). I went through the databases from 2002 to 2012 and marked all of the protests (MST and other movements) that included a demand about education. I started in 2002 because the CPT protest database pre-2002 does not indicate the type of demand.

²⁷These mobilizations were not usually focused entirely on education. For example, only an average of 30 percent of the MST educational protests between 2002 and 2012 were single-issue protests.

²⁹These include the ‘CPMI da Terra’ in 2005, ‘CPI das Ongs’ in 2009 and the ‘CPMI do MST’ in 2010. (Note: A CPMI, as opposed to a CPI, is a mixed inquiry between both the congress and senate).

³⁰The state Public Ministry in Rio Grande do Sul initiated a series of cases against the MST (from 2009 to 2011), and the TCU was the judicial body responsible for preventing the federal educational program PRONERA from functioning for two years (2009–2010). 

³¹These speeches can be watched online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPtcdDSqcgk.

³²Interview, Rosali Caldart, 17 January 2011.

³³Interview, Edgar Kolling, 18 November 2010.

Additional information

Rebecca Tarlau is a Visiting Professor of Educational Leadership and Societal Change at Soka University of America, and a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies. Her research analyzes the relationship between social movements, the state and education, contributing to debates about state–society relations, participatory governance, international and comparative education, and Freirean pedagogies.