by Shannon Walbran

"School is boring!" It's a common complaint, but what is concealed by the word "boring?" Tyrannical teachers? Repetitive exercises? Fear of failure? Lessons irrelevant to lives threatened by poverty, even in grade school? The Brazilian anthropologist and educator Tião (short for Sebastião) Rocha, 51, confirms all of these destructive factors and more.

In 1984, Rocha founded The People's Center for Culture and Development in his home state of Minas Gerais with a cohort of teachers fed up with low-quality education and high drop out rates. Over the last 15 years, the CPCD (the Portuguese initials) has used Brazilian music, dance and cuisine as the raw materials to construct interactive, meaningful activities to complement regular school curriculum.

Detail from illustration by Luiz Maia

Children ordinarily attend public schools in Brazil for half a day and are "free" for the other half – free to work, though child labor is illegal. CPCD's half-day program, held at a center called "To Be a Child" (Ser Criança), keeps children 7- to 14-years-old attending regular school by engaging their creativity, increasing their academic powers and fostering their self-respect.

Some parents who said they "needed their kids working" wanted to pull them out of To Be a Child but keep them in regular school. But when the children's truancy rates soared and their grades plummeted once again, parents realized that it was only in conjunction with To Be a Child that the children could benefit from the "official school." Rocha describes CPCD's goals: "We didn't want to simply replicate school, nor would that be the best way to help the children. We are a necessary complement to a formal education setting."

The masthead of Rocha's newsletter, "Ser Criança," translates as "To Be a Child," but the "to be" can also be translated as "to create," according to Rocha, who aims to re-awaken the child in both students and teachers.

"Kids want to go to school," says Rocha. "It's one of their central desires. But when they get there, the system excludes them, and they tend not to stay." He describes the all-too-familiar setting of children sitting at their desks for hours without moving, chanting multiplication tables, doing stacks of homework – and failing to see the importance of school in their lives. "It's almost predetermined that if the teacher has no resources and is not valued as a professional, she feels like a cog in the machinery. How can she pass on the delight of learning when she doesn't like school either? Without intervention, the pattern of children dropping out of school will continue, especially in a region as poor as ours."

Mining a New Vein: The Children

Minas Gerais ("General Mines") is a landlocked state with a rugged, mountainous terrain. The gold and diamond veins for which the region became famous ran dry a century ago. The land is still scattered with lovely Baroque churches and tranquil colonial villages, and tourism is an expanding source of income, but families in the region suffer from high unemployment. Moreover, people traditionally accustomed to "belonging to the mines" have not yet learned to exercise their citizenship rights, voting and participating on school boards.

Because of Brazil's reputation for poor schooling, the CPCD team was heavily conscious of the challenges that loomed before them. Rocha's innovative ideas about "learning through playing" made conventional teachers shrug and parents wrinkle their brows. When Rocha resolved to spin conventional educational concepts like a top, however, he reached far back into his personal history to assure himself and his team that kids would love this plan as much as he did.

"My Aunt is a Queen!"

On Rocha's first day of school, his kindergarten teacher opened up a book and began reading to the class, "Once upon a time there was a queen who –"

"My aunt is a queen!" Rocha shouted.

The teacher tried to silence him with, "Tião, this is a fairy tale. There are no queens in Brazil." To no avail; Rocha interrupted the story several times until the teacher finally packed him off to the principal's office. "I was already a problem student," he recalls with gentle irony. "No one listened to me on the playground, so I had to keep my regal lineage a secret."

Detail from illustration by Luiz Maia

Rocha graduated from high school and studied history at the university "to find my reality," he says. He got his master's degree "learning about the conquerers, but never the conquered." Continuing his studies, he seized upon anthropology and concentrated on Brazilian popular culture and folklore. The memory of his first day of school, however, lingered. "Little did they know that my aunt really was royalty." He pauses for effect. "She was the Queen of the Congada, an Afro-Brazilian royal court first registered in 1720. Every Sunday during the festivals from August to October, she would dress up with her crown, cloak and sceptre, and dance the Congada to the beat of Mozambican drums." He smiles as he sighs. "But I never got to tell my story in school."

As an adult, Rocha asked these questions of himself and of the professional educators and community activists who launched the CPCD: "Is it possible to promote high-quality education outside of a formal school setting? Can learning become so significant in the lives of children that they demand to have classes on weekends and holidays? Can we create an educational center that teachers, students, and the community can truly fall in love with?" Again, his answer was, "Yes, and we'll enjoy ourselves making it come true."

Going Round and Round Toward Respect

Every day, To Be a Child offers children the opportunity to plant and care for a garden, check out books from a reading room, make toys and cook jams and jellies from a fruit tree orchard that uses no harmful chemicals. Above all, though, the program provides a place to speak and be heard. Based on Paulo Freire's grassroots pedagogy, To Be a Child uses "the methodology of the circle" to even out the built-in hierarchy entrenched in traditional schools.

Detail from illustration by Luiz Maia

At the start of each session, children gather in a circle. Teachers are present, but they speak neither "for" the children nor "without" them. On a Friday in August, the kids started with a warm-up game and song, then shared news from home. They decided who would make lunch that day and split up into smaller groups to head for the workshops.

To Be a Child uses the circle for conflict resolution, to communicate goals and directions and to play together. A spirit of community is constructed and re-affirmed during this shared time. Moreover, any child can call a circle whenever necessary to discuss an issue in a democratic setting. Like Plato's "truth is all points of view," in the To Be a Child circle, all truths are heard, even ones that might have made teachers uneasy at first.

The conversations welcome questions about sexuality, family violence and the challenges of living in a small town in the interior of a developing country. Rocha says, "The teachers go through weeks of training to learn how to process important questions with the children. Adults don't have all of the answers."

The Methodology of Fun

Even the eyes of adults who really care about children and school tend to glaze over when abstract terms like "pedagogical methodology" and "long-term anti-recidivism strategies" float above meeting tables. Rocha combats grown-up boredom with a mix of poetry and reality. "I believe in Utopia," he says, "and I know how to find it through play."

Because a child's opinion is always important but not often heard, Rocha provides a column in the Ser Criança newsletter for children to share their thoughts. Under this picture of a tree made of puzzle pieces, young people wrote their ideas about recycling and how "it just makes sense." Paper recycling is one of the many artistic activities in Ser Criança's workshop that help teach planning and other thinking skills.

Teachers often express amazement that young people can remember hours of rap lyrics but not the state capitals. Reminding educators of their own youth, when pop charts were far more important than bar charts, is one way to start integrating fun into lesson plans.

Teacher training – not only providing educators with curriculum resources, but enhancing self-respect as professionals – is key to CPCD's mission. Playful ways to reach young people should not be ignored when training teachers or collaborating with parents: Why not play charades? Why not use puppets to conduct dialogues?

Rocha spoke after a session in which he had been instructing a class of 20 teachers on new games for literacy development. "We play, too, and we remember better because of it," he explains. A side benefit is the strengthening of relationships among teachers. In an ordinary training conference, educators leave without even knowing each others' names. After a session with Rocha, in which the circle offers an opportunity to share their problems, fears and hopes, teachers gain a new respect for each other, reinforcing their mission.

Detail from illustration by Luiz Maia

Brazil needs this approach to education, says Caius Brandão, program director of the Rio-based Committee to Democratize Information Technology (CDI), which sets up citizenship and computer schools in low-income neighborhoods. "Freire speaks of the traditional educational system as 'banking' – teachers deposit information into empty students. The circle changes all that. Teachers have to examine their own values and respond as equal participants in the discussion. Removing the pedestal that has protected them in the past is not easy, because our teachers aren't used to that kind of exposure. But it's a great way to address the real roots of our students' challenges regarding critical thinking and the political implications of education."

The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) invented a taxonomy that aligns with how Rocha engages minds in a pleasurable way. Huizinga posited that Homo ludens, "person who plays," may in fact be our next level of human evolution, a step beyond Homo sapiens, "person who reasons."

According to the education consultant Mary Jo Thompson of Minnesota, "Play takes advantage of children's natural curiosity and turns learning into a joyful exploration instead of drudgery." In her seminars on integrating arts into mainstream curriculum for U.S. teachers, Thompson says that since "making" is what sets humans apart from animals, games invented by students directly increase their self-worth. "When children create something that is both useful and beautiful, they can see their own value as contributors to human civilization and are therefore less likely to become victims."

Detail from illustration by Luiz Maia

"Pedagogical methodology" for Rocha seems to be a synonym for "bag of tricks," because that bag is exactly what he hands to kids; more importantly, he helps them fill it up themselves.

Participants in To Be a Child recognize each other on the street by their special backpacks for books and toys. Mothers in the communities sew the backpacks from fabric remnants; selling the bags is a small source of income for their families.

"I make toys at the To Be a Child center," says Gustavo, 11 years old. "It's super cool." In a toy workshop, children take scrap like old plastic soda bottles and transform them into helicopters and puppets. In addition to studying the environment via a creative recycling program, the children learn to read and write by dictating the directions to construct the playthings they invent. The results are published in a newspaper which is distributed, along with models of the actual toys, to area schools.

Parents were skeptical about To Be a Child when it started. "They've changed their minds," says Rocha, because kids participating in the program have improved their grades and their behavior.

"I really didn't want my kids coming to the center," says Maria, the mother of Edson and Bebeto, "because I needed them working. But I know it's important! It was only here that Eddy, who took such a long time to learn things, finally found his intelligence and learned how to write." Rocha has provided families a small source of income through sewing bags for toys, but the parents also accept the sacrifice of losing their children as workers in order to encourage them to grow up educated.

One simple plaything that has worked wonders with literacy development is a Monopoly-like board game. Rolling the dice lands you on a space with a single word, like "house." The other player draws a card and gives you directions for what to do with the word. "Tell me a story using this word" or "Draw me a picture" or "Act it out." Successfully using the vocabulary gains you another turn. Rocha says, "We have 168 educational games in our collection, adapted and made by the children themselves."

Carrot Ice Cream, Too

In Curvelo, 100 children attend To Be a Child in the morning session, and another 100 come for the afternoon, but the program employs only one cook. Solution: the kids have become expert chefs, and they know that fun is an ingredient as important as spices.

It's a start-to-finish operation in the organic garden. Kids plant and water the crops, pick and preserve the harvest. Like recycling scrap into crafts and producing toys, games and a newspaper, future job skills are acquired naturally and always with high energy. The fun comes in the Experimental Kitchen. "They put together the craziest combinations," laughs Rocha, "and test them out on their friends. Can you imagine eating candy made from collard greens?" Reading and writing come into the act when recipes are written down, menus prepared, and general "yum" versus "yuck" reactions are recorded.

"Best of all," says Rocha, "the kids are actually eating their vegetables." At astonishing rates, too. Rocha estimates that their daily diet now includes nine or ten kinds of vegetables. Incidences of anemia have dropped; the children have better general health and fewer colds.

Minas Gerais is well-known for its rich stew called feijoada, a dark mixture of beans, sausage and every part of the pig except the grunt. Rocha relates that the kids' experiments have led to the creation of a vegetarian feijoada, including potato peels and other vegetable scraps that contain a multitude of vitamins but are usually tossed into the garbage.

Using To Be a Child's methods, teachers in three Brazilian states have gone through training, and changes are proliferating like organically-grown carrots. More than 15,000 teachers and children have been served. However, the CPCD will always have new rows to hoe when faced with decrepit, underfunded schools throughout Brazil.

Detail from illustration by Luiz Maia

Ashoka Innovators for the Public elected Rocha as a Fellow in 1992. The director in Brazil, Mônica de Roure, praises him for his creativity and persistence. "Tião is the kind of person who has an idea and won't let it go until he turns it into reality," says de Roure. "He has collaborated with other Ashoka Fellows to share his strategies and has won support from key national and international funders such as the Orsa Foundation, the Ayrton Senna Institute, and Kellogg. These are clear testaments to the high quality of his work." In 1995, Ser Criança won first place in the Banco Itaú / UNICEF "Education and Participation" awards.

Thiago, 12, sums it up: "To Be a Child is a good thing because we learn how to make lots of toys and we can teach other kids who aren't in the program with us." This is exactly the kind of generous spirit that demonstrates what people can achieve with a sense of self-respect and a subsequent turning outward to the community. Rocha calls himself "an anthropologist by education, a grassroots educator by political choice, and a folklorist by necessity," and thanks his aunt, the queen, for inspiring him. Whether our heritage is common or royal, play may indeed accelerate our evolution as full human beings.

An international exchange of work produced by young artists from To Be a Child was an great success for the CPCD. If a school or museum would like to sponsor an exhibit in their country, they could write directly to Tião at the email address below.

Tião is always open to teacher exchanges, offers from universities and educational ideas from other countries. He would like to know if schools outside of Brazil would be interested in purchasing and implementing the games developed and made by students in CPCD programs.

CPCD Centro Popular de Cultura e Desenvolvimento
Rua Paraisópolis, 80
Santa Teresa
31010-330 Belo Horizonte Minas Gerais
Brazil
tel: 55-31-463-6357
fax: 55-31-463-0012
Email: cpcd@globalsite.com.br
Web page: www.cpcd.org.br

Who was Paulo Freire? Paulo Freire (1921-1997), the great Brazilian educator, left behind an extraordinary legacy of radical thought on education and social justice, not to mention friends and devotees around the globe. After his exile from Brazil following the military coup in 1964, Freire taught in Chile and was a consultant to UNESCO. He taught at Harvard and was a consultant to the World Council of Churches before returning to Brazil in 1981. His best-selling work, "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" (1970), called for a revolutionary restructuring of education. Freire believed in the reversal of the teacher-student hierarchy and literacy as empowerment. Employing visual materials, Freire helped pre-literate people from marginalized communities tell their personal histories and access their political rights. His methods have been adopted by progressive educators worldwide. Return to article