Uma escola para homem rural: A cultura popular, os camponeses e o movimento de educação de base (1960-1964)

Abstract

In the 1960s, the intervention on popular culture became an assumption of the political action of the modernizing agents of Brazilian society. Through the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil (CNBB), the Catholic Church developed a nationwide educational project, linking its radio stations in Brazil to the centers of radio education, and in 1961 it created the Basic Education Movement (MEB). The theoretical and philosophical assumptions of the movement transcended the issues of formal learning and were based on strategies of action of the Catholic Church on issues of economic growth and social development of the poor regions of Brazil. This article is about the peasants who participated in the MEB and their school experiences. It evaluates the precepts of rural education, civic education and adult literacy proposed in the action of the agents and the modernizing institutions of the Brazilian countryside. I have analyzed the processes of assimilation and resistance of the peasants to the modernizing principles and projects outside their culture. New rhythms of time, representations and meanings were introduced by schools into the secular cultural practices of the Brazilian peasantry. In the MEB, this phenomenon resulted both in the assimilation of new stimuli brought by the school, and in the insurrection of customs and habits connected to the ritualistic and customary functions of the individual and/or rural community.