Radical democracy in education in Brazil
Porto Alegre has become famous for its radical democratic Participatory Budget (PB) process. Over the past 12 years decisions about the city’s budget priorities have been made through an annual process of local and city-wide meetings. This successful experiment in direct democracy has now been extended to the whole state, with a population of 10 million.
In 1999, the first year of the Participatory Budget process at state level, 190,000 people took part in the meetings. In 2000, 281,000 people participated in 670 local assemblies. The number of participants in 2001, the third year, is 378,000.
What is less well-known is that, in the field of education, the state government, again building on the experience of Porto Alegre, has instituted an equally successful process of popular democratic policy-making in education based, like the PB, on local and regional mass meetings, called the ‘School Constituency’ (Constituinte Escolar).
The principles of the School Constituency are:
Education as a right of all citizens, with particular emphasis on the situation of those who throughout history have been denied this right, not having access to school or being excluded from it.
Popular participation as a method of management of public policy in the field of education, stimulating and guaranteeing the conditions for the collective construction of the education we want.
Dialogue as a an ethical-existential principle of a humanist project based on solidarity, which respects differences and the plurality of visions of the world, while also being critical and proactive in the face of social inequalities and injustices.
Radicalisation of Democracy as the strategic objective of a government of the left, committed to the interests of the majority, the popular classes, stimulating co-management of the public sphere as a step towards popular sovereignty and control over the state.
Utopia as a motivating vision of the education and the school we want, and also of the project of socio-economic development which is both possible and necessary for the great majority of the excluded and the exploited in the capitalist system. Utopia as the motor force, driving forward the society we want to build.
The process of the School Constituency, organised in five stages, was launched by the State Department of Education in April 1999, followed by regional launch meetings and the election of school and regional coordinating committees.
From May to November 1999 problems and good practice at the local level were analysed, resulting in the identification of 25 key issues.
From December 1999 to June 2000 these issues were explored in-depth and briefing papers produced on each, drawing on educationists such as Paulo Freire. From June to August 2000 a Draft Text based on these discussions was debated and amended in 191 municipal or micro-regional conferences, involving 60,000 people.
The conferences resulted in a revised Draft Text which was the basis of 31 Regional Pre-Conferences with about 9000 people elected as delegates from the municipal or micro-regional pre-conferences.
Finally, a further revised version of the Draft Text was discussed at the State Conference by 3,500 delegates elected from the Regional conferences, organised into 100 working groups. At the end, all the proposals were voted on.
In the final stage of the School Constituency, which began in September 2000 and is still continuing, the principles and policies agreed on are being translated into action plans at the local level.
The Three Dimensions of the Democratisation of Education
The three dimensions of PT education policy are:
the democratisation of access,
the democratisation of knowledge, and
the democratisation of management.
The democratisation of access means education for all, through a range of policies from expanding provision from pre-school to adult literacy and education projects for youth and adult workers.
The democratisation of knowledge to enable learning for all means remaking the curriculum – how it is organised, taught and evaluated - to make it meaningful to the whole community.
The key to this is the creation of democratic power relations, within the school and in its relations with the community, establishing a broad process of participation in order to rethink the curriculum.
At school level, the main mechanism of the democratisation of management is the elected School Council, composed of representatives of all the sectors of the school community – parents, students, teachers and other school workers – with deliberative powers. The school principal and vice-principal are directly elected for periods of three years.
To make democratisation viable, it is not enough to democratise the school. It is also necessary to democratise the State educational administration, replacing bureaucratic, fragmented, top-down and centralised functioning by an interdisciplinary, horizontal and decentralised dynamic.
Lucia Camini, the State Secretary of Education, explains the thinking behind the School Constituency.
"We live in a society that holds exclusion as a rule, in which democracy is reduced to electing representatives who work out, decide and implement public policies.
"Education policies are, traditionally, designed in offices and passed to schools through packages with formulae and pedagogical manuals to be implemented.
"Reversing this practice, the State Department of Education in Rio Grande do Sul launched the School Constituency as a movement for constructing educational policy.
"In the construction of the Popular Democratic School, process and result, content and form, are deeply interconnected. We will only build up a popular school through the direct participation of all the people involved in the educational process.
"With the School Constit-uency movement, we are recovering the real sense of democracy – ‘the people’s government’. We are ‘handing over the school to those who make the school happen’ and changing the State Public Education into a truly public education."
Participatory democracy as an educational process
For the PT, the direct democracy of the Participatory Budget and School Constituency processes is itself a crucial educational experience by which working people become the agents, not the objects, of history.
"In this workers’ struggle for their rights, in their organisation and mobilisation we find a new kind of relationship between education and the construction of the human being. […] …the exercise of demands and social struggle are in themselves educative processes for the effective construction of transformative historical individuals.
"You do not educate people to form individuals; the formation of individuals takes place through actions and movements developed in the popular struggle.
"The struggle itself for education, for the right to go to school and for changes in its role and the way in which they develop their work, for example, the exercise of this right of demanding rights, creates in the individual a new vision of society, new relations among them, a political culture where workers identify themselves effectively as individuals who are transforming and constructing history."
Of course, this experiment in radical popular democracy is not without problems and difficulties, in a national context of a government committed to a neoliberal agenda.
But the level of popular support for it is growing, as demonstrated by the numbers participating, as well as by the re-election over 12 years of the PT council in Porto Alegre and their victory in the state election.
Here in Britain our experience in education is the exact opposite – the steady erosion of any popular influence, as local authorities become little more than government puppets, private companies move in, teachers are bound by government dictates, and local communities remain powerless.
Up to now the left has had little to offer in terms of an alternative popular democratic vision to authoritarian managerialism. Porto Alegre and Rio Grande do Sul show a future worth fighting for.
(All quotes in this article come from Principles and Directives for State Public Education, Government of Rio Grande do Sul, 2000, translation by RH)