Abstract
To be landless in Brazil has historically meant a fundamental denial of human dignity. The Landless Workers Movement (MST; Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra) of Brazil is a movement of rural, landless Brazilians with a socialist vision for education, rural development, and democracy. More than four decades ago, the Sem Terra (Landless) began their struggle for land redistribution, agrarian reform, and social justice in Brazil and are now organized in 24 out of 26 Brazilian states. They soon realized that there were other barriers to individual and social transformation. In the words of MST leader João Pedro Stédile (2003): “We learned that the lack of capital is a fence . . . a lack of knowledge is a fence” (p. 15). This realization planted the seeds for a Pedagogy of the Land—an educational project that would recover the dignity of the landless, build a collective identity that respected the diversity and knowledge of all rural peoples, and support holistic human development.
For the MST, to occupy education is to claim the right to construct and share alternative forms of knowledge that reflect diverse cultures and struggles of the people who live in the Brazilian countryside. These goals have shaped the movement’s Long March to occupy rural public education—the subject of this fine-grained political ethnography by Dr. Rebecca Tarlau. With the state and municipal education system as her unit of analysis, Tarlau presents a rich, thick description of the micro-politics of educational and social change in a society defined by stratifications of class, gender, race, indigenous, rural-urban, and other forms of difference. Her goal is to demonstrate the prefigurative politics enacted by the movement “within, through and outside the state” (p. 283) to claim a radically different approach to rural education and participatory governance.
The analysis is informed by interviews conducted over the span of 20 months between 2009 and 2015 with a wide range of key actors including MST activists, politicians, bureaucrats, academics, and representatives of rural trade unions, the Catholic Church, UNESCO, and UNICEF. Tarlau also draws on extensive secondary sources including extent scholarship on the MST in English and Portuguese, government policies and reports, media reports, local historical archives, and a range of texts produced by the movement including educational proposals, textbooks, media communications, conference programs, meeting agendas, flyers, and activist study texts.
This is a well-structured book organized into two parts consisting of three chapters each along with an Introduction, Conclusion, and Epilogue. After an Introduction which lays out the main arguments, the first part of the book provides an overview of the MST vision for rural public education and discusses how the MST constructed a national program for rural education. The second part of the book presents in-depth studies of how the movement engaged state and municipal government apparatus at particular historical moments. Key theoretical arguments are revisited in the concluding chapters along with a brief discussion of the struggles that lie ahead under the right-wing administration of President Jair Bolsonaro.
In addition, the book lends itself to teaching with the inclusion of detailed notes for each chapter, helpful lists of illustrations, abbreviations and Portuguese terms, and a thorough Index to help navigate the wealth of information in this book including key concepts, theories and theorists, rural education policies and programs, political parties, government agencies, civil society organizations, universities, MST settlements as well as all key research participants named in the book (MST, government, and civil society). The Appendix section includes three key MST education proposals as well as curriculum overviews for the first (1998-2010) and most recent courses (2007-2011) developed in partnership with universities.
Chapter 1 discusses early educational experiments for children, youth, and adults and philosophical influences including Paulo Freire, Moisey Pistrak, and Anton Makarenko (see also Tarlau, 2012), which laid the groundwork for the MST vision for an Education of the Countryside (EC, Educação do Campo). The Worker Party–led state government of Rio Grande do Sul provided official recognition and public funding for a range of MST education initiatives, including high school degrees for teaching certification and agricultural production; literacy education based on EC principles and pedagogy; the establishment of a permanent teacher training institute (ITERRA) and independent MST primary and high schools; and a range of education publications that continue till today. Tarlau emphasizes that these gains were secured even as post-dictatorship Brazil adopted a neoliberal development project with the support of transnational neoliberal actors such as the World Bank and multinational agrobusinesses.
Chapters 2 and 3 analyze how the movement engaged with federal governments of differing political ideologies in order to institutionalize its vision for an Education of the Countryside. Chapter 2 examines the campaign for PRONERA (National Program for Education in Areas of Agrarian Reform), which would provide federal funding to landless youth and adults in the agrarian reform camps and settlements to continue their education through programs for literacy, high schools, and bachelor’s degree courses in partnership with local universities. Chapter 3 discusses the politics of institutionalization after additional MST proposals (e.g., for rural teacher training) were inserted into national policy through laws, programs, and a dedicated government office.
Through these chapters, Tarlau seeks to highlight the fluid strategic repertoire including disruption, persuasion, negotiation, and strategic alliances with other members of civil society which exemplify the Gramscian war of position enacted by the movement to occupy a range of more and less formal policymaking arenas. She also provides a comprehensive explication of the significance of social movement presence in these spaces. For the first time in the history of Brazil, these federal initiatives recognized and affirmed the diverse identities and cultures of rural communities and provided dedicated if irregular resources for rural education. However, she concludes that under the influence of conservatives and agribusinesses, federal initiatives have diluted more radical components of the proposals relating to mechanisms for participatory, collective governance. Similarly, chapter 2 discusses the transformation of elite private and public Brazilian universities over the last decade through partnerships with the MST to provide degree programs shaped by the Pedagogy of the Land beginning with courses for teacher training and agricultural production and now including medicine, law, and geography. Reflections from professors as well as program graduates (including those who have since left the movement) provide complex insights into the ways in which the movement seeks to challenge embedded knowledge hierarchies and elitist logics about the ownership of knowledge.
The second half of the book presents a situated analysis of how the movement is able to navigate subnational institutional spheres in order to enhance the state’s capacity to deliver public goods like education while maintaining autonomy. In addition to its formidable mobilizational capacity, Tarlau argues that it is the knowledge and capacity accumulated over four decades of struggle that position the MST advantageously in relation to historically underresourced rural municipalities, regardless of differences in political ideology. Furthermore, it is this combination of factors that shapes the particular forms of what Sonia Alvarez refers to as cogovernance of public education institutions by state actors as well as social movements to produce radical democratic subjects (p. 10).
For the MST, successful occupations culminate in direct if often contentious (p. 274) partnerships for cogovernance with the state to provide education programs which support the broader goal of constructing socialism in the Brazilian countryside (p. 128). Thus, victories have included schools wholly governed by the MST in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul in the early 1980s (chapter 4); as well as opportunities to influence curriculum, pedagogy, and non-MST teachers in the northern states of Pernambuco in the nineties (chapter 5) and Ceará in the late 2000s (chapter 6).
However, in all three states, victories have been accompanied by internal and external setbacks that underline the enduring power of capitalist ideologies of education, namely, individualism, competition, standardization, commodification, and so forth. As Tarlau acknowledges, the MST has had the least success in the wealthy industrialized state of Sao Paulo where the influence of market-oriented global education reform movement (GERM) has been the strongest in Brazil.
Nevertheless, with its collective, nonhierarchical, and transformative orientation, MST education represents a fundamental threat to the edifice of capitalism rooted in individual self-interest. Chapter 6 provides a particularly inspiring account of how MST students, parents, teachers, and entire communities in Ceará participated in the establishment and governance of their new secondary schools. Relatedly, although gender and race dynamics are not analyzed in this book, in the Conclusion Tarlau notes that the Education Sector has historically provided a space in which women, and more recently youth, have mobilized to critique and transform patriarchal and heteronormative cultures within the movement (see also Thapliyal, 2019).
In conclusion, Rebecca Tarlau writes in deep solidarity with the MST with whom her relationship spans more than a decade. The struggle of the MST has always been to compel the state to become a public space. This book reminds us not only that public education is contested terrain, but that it lies at the heart of political contestation in capitalist democracies.