Animação Cultural: uma inovação pedagógica na escola pública fluminense dos anos 1980

Abstract

This biographically-oriented research, based on semi-structured interviews, has the general purpose of analyzing the history of public education in modern times and its organization in Brazil, amidst conflicting liberal and democratic processes which produced an unequal and combined economic movement in the country, concentrating richness in the upper classes as opposed to the lower ones. Such model of society led to a school system in Brazil usually characterized by duality with plenty of resources for the rich, but precarious for the economically impoverished. Efforts to overcome this educational situation were successful in two moments: when Anísio Teixeira s Escola Parque (Park School) was attained in the 1950s, and when the Centros Integrados de Educação Pública (CIEPs, Public Education Integrated Centers) were implemented by Darcy Ribeiro in 1983. They were based on Anísio Teixeira s idea that the inclusion of the popular classes was a republican right, which thus far had been fragile. Due to the opposing interests of a conservative elite, both projects eventually were politically abandoned. Aiming at not allowing these achievements to be erased from history and highlighting them as a permanent action in favor of the popular classes, our object of study prioritizes the Cultural Entertainment program, introduced in the public school system in the state of Rio de Janeiro in the 1980s. This was an innovative proposal in Brazilian education, which sought to acknowledge the cultural experiences of the populations living near the CIEPs as ethical, aesthetic, and social emancipatory expressions. One of the values of this proposal was to integrate popular knowledge to the knowledge produced in school, and vice versa. In this regard, through the first Special Education Program, Darcy Ribeiro and Cecília Fernandez Conde devised the role of Cultural Entertainer. It was performed by popular artists working as bards, poets, musicians, visual artists, etc. who lived in the same areas where the CIEPs were located and who taught popular culture in the schools. The goal was to create a school that offered both formal knowledge and creative arts as means to prepare students for the whole human dimension, and where the artistic and critical praxis combined thinking and doing without any hierarchy.