Educação do Campo [Education for and by the countryside] as a political project in the context of the struggle for land in Brazil

Abstract

Latin American and Brazilian rural social movements believe that significant social transformation requires the collective construction of a political project of an historical character. Education is conceived as an historical–cultural and political project to transform the peasantry into an historical subject through emancipatory educational–pedagogical praxis. The Landless Workers Movement (MST), the most emblematic peasant movement in Brazil, has played the leading role in this debate, which also includes many other peasant organizations. The MST has identified education as the key element in forging an historical–political actor out of the landless peasantry. This is articulated through the struggle for education for rural peoples, and along a theoretical–epistemic axis that revolves around the emergent concept of Educação do Campo (‘Education for and by the Countryside’). I ask how the MST conceptualizes education, and what the role is of education in strengthening peasant resistance and sharpening the dispute between political projects for the countryside. I focus on the epistemic dimensions of the concepts of education and pedagogy in the trajectory of the MST in Brazil, and I examine Educação do Campo as an educational-political project and in terms of policy conquests in the political dispute between the rival political projects for the Brazilian countryside of peasants and capital.

Keywords:

• Educação do Campo
• MST
• social movements
• rural education
• Brazil
• PRONERA
• epistemology

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), and in particular the members of the Education Sector and the Collective of Educators of the Prestes Commune Brigade in the Crateús region of Ceará, Brazil, for inviting me to work with them and for sharing their experiences and knowledge with me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 What I call the ‘epistemic basis’ is related to the dimension of knowledge, or of ‘knowing', about the reality of things. It refers to knowledge that is situated in a given time and space; that emanates from an historical–political subject with the capacity to interpret their own reality and have an impact on it. In this sense, an epistemic ‘take’ presupposes a pre-theoretic positioning with respect to a given reality – that is, the establishment of a dialogic and dialectical relationship between reality and knowledge, in which it is possible to put forth multiple interpretations of the historical moment, to, later, posit its theorization, as well as strategies for social and political intervention (Zemelman 2004; Barbosa and Sollano 2014).

2 In methodological terms, this essay is the product of both an extensive revision of documents (by and about the MST) and of fieldwork. Some of the fieldwork was carried out as part of the research for my doctoral dissertation (Barbosa 2013b) in the Postgraduate Program in Latin American Studies of the National Autonomous University of México (UNAM) and for my papers in Portuguese and Spanish, many of which are cited in this essay. It also the product of participant–observer research and analysis spanning a full decade of participation in political activities of the MST, and in those organized by its Education Sector. Over the past decade I have been a professor in the Pedagogy of the Land undergraduate program for militants of La Via Campesina-Brazil, carried out under an agreement between the Federal University of Ceará (UFC) and the MST, I have been involved in the coordination of various educational programs funded by PRONERA (explained in this essay), and I am an active member of the Collective of Agrarian Reform Educators of the Education Sector of MST-Ceará.

3 What I refer to as the ‘project of modernity’ refers to the process of conforming the nation-state in our continent, which itself has consolidated capitalism as its economic and political–ideological project. The modernization project has sharpened differences based on the social relations of production and class antagonism. In the process of building the nation-state in Latin America, the coercive apparatus allowed the state to consolidate a monopoly over violence as a form of social control. Thus, there is a multiple structure of domination: economic (dependent capitalism of the periphery), symbolic–ideological (combining elements of Spanish and Portuguese cultural domination with the naturalization of capitalism and class difference) and coercive (Barbosa 2014).

4 For example, the Peasant Leagues, linked to the Brazilian Communist Party, who engaged in agrarian struggles in Brazil's Northeast region beginning in the mid-1940s, are one of the previous experiences that have inspired the MST (Welch 2009).

5 Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira was President of Brazil from 1956 to 1961.

6 Initials of the Pastoral Land Commission in Portuguese.

7 The MST identifies itself as a Landless Movement (in capitals) to strengthen its political identity and its identifying ethos linked to the countryside, i.e., the life-sustaining territory and site of its cultural and material (re)production.

8 Created when lands are first occupied, as the first step in the struggle to establish legal land reform settlements. When occupying lands, families build encampments where they live under black plastic tarpaulins or palm fronds, where they remain in resistance while negotiations with the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) proceed. The Institute is the public entity tasked under Brazilian law with reassigning unproductive lands and carrying out agrarian reform. It rarely acts without pressure from below in the form of land occupations.

9 The MST has held six national congresses: 1^st Congress (1984) – ‘There is No Democracy without Agrarian Reform’; 2^nd Congress (1990) – ‘Occupy, Resist, and Produce’; 3^rd Congress (1995) – ‘Agrarian Reform: Everyone's Struggle’; 4^th Congress (2000) – ‘Agrarian Reform: For a Brazil Free of Latifúndios; 5^th Congress (2007) – ‘Agrarian Reform: For Social Justice and Peoples' Sovereignty’; 6^th Congress (2014) – ‘Struggle: Build Popular Agrarian Reform'.

10 See Américo (2014).

11 See the discussions by da Silva (2014) and Sevilla Guzman (2006) on the peasantry and Marx's characterization of class consciousness in a class ‘in itself and for itself’.

12 The following organizations and social movements make up La Vía Campesina–Brazil: the MST, the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), the Rural Youth Pastoral (PJR), the Small Farmers Movement (MPA), the Movement of People Affected by Dams (MAB), the Movement of Peasant Women (MMC), artisanal fisherfolk, and representatives of indigenous peoples, such as the Missionary Indigenous Council (CIMI).

13 Defined by Martínez-Torres and Rosset (2014:982) as: ‘A collective construction of emergent meaning based on dialog between people with different historically specific experiences, cosmovisions, and ways of knowing, particularly when faced with new collective challenges in a changing world. Such dialog is based on exchange among differences and on collective reflection, often leading to emergent re-contextualization and resignification of knowledges and meanings related to histories, traditions, territorialities, experiences, processes and actions. The new collective understandings, meanings and knowledges may form the basis for collective actions of resistance and construction of new processes'.

14 See Tarlau (2015) for one version of the ‘late arrival’ of CONTAG to the EdC scene. She also provides an analysis (somewhat ‘CONTAG-centric’) of how both the MST and CONTAG, historic and current antagonists who sometimes work together pragmatically, have been important in terms of interaction with the state (not the subject of the present paper).

15 After submitting this paper for publication, the II ENERA was held, in September of 2015 (which I attended as part of the MST delegation from Ceará). The objective was precisely to push the debate of EdC as a political project. A central topic was the need to build a strategic alliance between the specific struggle for EdC and the wider struggle for the defense of public education in both the city and the countryside. Other key points were the political role of EdC in the struggle for land and for agrarian reform, the need to give a central role to agroecology in EdC curricula, the denunciations of the widespread closures of rural schools, and the demand for better infrastructure for schools located in MST encampments and agrarian reform settlements.

16 Original title of the document, translated into English.

17 Elsewhere I have analyzed at length the democratization of access to education by rural peoples through PRONERA: Barbosa (2012, 2013c, 2015).

18 The earliest examples are documented in the Caderno de Educação no. 3, de 1994, produced by the Education Sector of the MST.

19 According to data I had access to during a visit to the IEJC, during that time period they created two secondary school and four high school programs, one of which is documented in Cadernos do ITERRA no. 12 (2007).

20 This project was carried out between 2006 and 2008 with PRONERA resources, under an agreement between the MST–Ceará, the Universidade Estadual do Ceará and INCRA. I participated in the project as Educational Coordinator. We have documented this experience in terms of its scope, limits and challenges faced under the dispute between political projects (Barbosa and Gadelha 2009; Barbosa and Soares 2012).

21 The Universidade de Brasília (UnB) was one of the first to offer undergraduate programs funded by PRONERA. Gradually other universities were added, like the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), the Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA) and the Universidade Federal do Sergipe (UFSE). Today, there are more than 60 Brazilian public universities that offer undergraduate and graduate programs under PRONERA in the following areas: ‘Pedagogy of the Land’, rural education, agriculture, social work, law, geography, history, veterinary medicine, and diverse graduate and specialization courses.

22 In my case, in 2005 I taught sociology in the bachelor's program on Pedagogy for the Land at the Universidade Federal do Ceará (UFC).

23 In the second ENERA, which took place in 2015, the Second National Study on Education and Agrarian Reform (PNERA) was presented. It contains a database of all PRONERA projects from 1998 through 2011, and is available at IPEA (2015).

24 An example of the programs consolidated under the National Policy for EdC are those in Ceará state. Since 2011, there have been four new rural high schools with the EdC program, curricula designed by the MST in negotiation with the state Board of Education, and MST militants who have gone through the teacher training programs among their administrators and teachers.

25 According to data from the School Census carried out by the Anísio Teixeira National Institute of Educational Studies and Research, Ministry of Education and Culture (INEP-MEC), in 2009 there was a significant drop in the number of municipal- and state-level public schools in the rural area throughout Brazil's five regions: 39 percent fewer in the Center-East and South, 22.5 percent fewer in the Northeast, 20 percent fewer in the Southeast and 14.4 percent fewer in the North. According to the same census, 37,000 rural schools were closed during the last 15 years.

26 These issues have been the subject of much internal debate, in which I have been an active participant, in Ceará throughout 2014 and 2015.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lia Pinheiro Barbosa

Lia Pinheiro Barbosa is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the State University of Ceará (UECE) in Crateús, Ceará, Brazil, and in the Graduate Program on Public Policy and Society at the Fortaleza campus of the same university, and a member of the Collective of Educators of the Prestes Commune Brigade of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in the Crateús region. She is a sociologist with a PhD in Latin American Studies from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and a member of the Otros Saberes Transnational Network (RETOS) and the Program on Pedagogical Alternatives and Educational Prospects (APPeAL-UNAM).