Amigos do Opus, ando recebendo vários
textos em inglês e não tenho tido tempo de traduzi-los, mais uma vez peço
desculpas.
No entanto, mesmo estando em inglês,
este texto merece sua atenção.
Proposta: O professor de filosofia
Carlos Fraenkel, da Universidade MacGill em Montreal, Canadá, discute sua
experiência e o ensino de filosofia a alunos de escolas secundárias em
Salvador, Bahia.
Breve revisão: gostei de como Fraenkel
aprecia e participa num ensino da filosofia que se constrói sobre a prática do
pensamento crítico mediado pela reflexão filosófica sistemática, proposta pelos professores brasileiros do ensino médio
soteropolitano (de Salvador, gostei da palavra inusitada). Ao usar o Direito e
determinadas discussões teológicas comuns ás religiões brasileiras e cotidiano
urbano, o ensino de filosofia se torna um exercício de libertação dos becos
conceituais e semânticos que comprimem o universo discursivo da subalteridade.
Concordam?
Boa leitura!
Obrigado T.M.O.
Obrigado T.M.O.
---
Getting out of the cave and seeing
things as they really are: that’s what philosophy is about, according to Almira
Ribeiro. Ribeiro teaches the subject in a high school in Itapuã, a beautiful,
poor, violent neighborhood on the periphery of Salvador, capital of the state
of Bahia in Brazil’s northeast. She is the most philosophically passionate
person I’ve ever met.
Most of the four million slaves shipped
from Africa to Brazil were sold in Salvador, the first residence of Portugal’s
colonial rulers. It’s still Brazil’s blackest city. In Ribeiro’s neighborhood,
children play football or do capoeira, pray in Pentecostal Churches or
worship African gods. Many are involved with drugs; “every year we lose
students to crack,” she tells me. And they study philosophy two hours each week
because of a 2008 law that mandates philosophy instruction in all Brazilian
high schools. Nine million teenagers now take philosophy classes for three
years.
“But seeing things as they really are
isn’t enough,” Ribeiro insists. As in Plato’s parable in The Republic,
the students must go back to the cave and apply what they’ve learned. Their
lives give them rich opportunities for such application. The contrast between
the new luxury hotels along the beach and Itapuã’s overcrowded streets gives
rise to questions about equality and justice. Children kicking around a can
introduce a discussion about democracy: football is one of the few truly
democratic practices here; success depends on merit, not class privilege.
Moving between philosophy and practice, the students can revise their views in
light of what Plato, Hobbes, or Locke had to say about equality, justice, and
democracy and discuss their own roles as political agents.
To foster that discussion, Ribeiro must
take on a deeply rooted political defeatism. Voting in Brazil is obligatory,
but many think it’s useless. In 2010, the largest number of votes for any
member of congress went to Tiririca, a popular TV clown, who ran on the slogan,
“I don’t know what a congressman does, but vote me in and I’ll tell you.” João
Belmiro, another high school philosophy teacher, finds this outrageous.
Philosophy, he hopes, will bring change before long.
“There are also other ways of political
participation,” Ribeiro tells her students. She gives them the town hall’s
phone number for complaints about infrastructure and asks them to find
something in their street they want repaired. When one student calls, nothing
happens. But when fifteen call, the city reacts. “You see that pothole?” she
asks me. “It’s been closed. And that street lantern? It’s been fixed. Thanks to
our philosophy class. . . . Politicians can’t afford disgruntled citizens who
will vote them out of office.” In the same vein she’s now organizing an
association of philosophy teachers. One urgent matter is the lack of qualified
personnel. Another project is improving the relationship with the philosophy
department at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), the region’s academic
hub. Most teachers I meet complain that academic philosophers ignore them or
look down on them.
That’s not surprising, considering that
the 2008 law is above all a political project. In 1971 the military
dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985 eliminated philosophy from
high schools. Teachers, professors in departments of education, and political
activists championed its return, while most academic philosophers were either
indifferent or suspicious. The dictatorship seems to have understood
philosophy’s potential to create engaged citizens; it replaced philosophy with
a course on Moral and Civic Education and one on Brazil’s Social and Political
Organization (“to inculcate good manners and patriotic values and to justify
the political order of the generals,” one UFBA colleague recalls from his high
school days).
The official rationale for the 2008 law
is that philosophy “is necessary for the exercise of citizenship.” The law—the
world’s largest-scale attempt to bring philosophy into the public sphere—thus
represents an experiment in democracy. Among teachers at least, many share
Ribeiro’s hope that philosophy will provide a path to greater civic
participation and equality. Can it do even more? Can it teach students to
question and challenge the foundations of society itself?
• • •
I was intrigued when I first heard about
the law and wanted to see for myself whether philosophy could do something
outside of academia. My path to this subject is both intellectual and personal.
I am an academic philosopher in Canada, with Brazilian roots: my parents were
activists with a Marxist student group opposing the dictatorship and fled
before my birth, though we returned to Brazil for four years after the 1979
amnesty for political refugees. With the help of colleagues and undergraduates
from the UFBA philosophy department, I gained access to a broad range of
schools in Salvador, where I was often welcomed as a guest teacher and had the
opportunity to discuss with teachers their curricula, instructional styles, and
hopes for the students.
In every classroom I was at first
flooded with questions: Who is this professor from Montreal and what’s he doing
here? the students wondered. I quickly learned that my excitement about
Brazil’s experiment with philosophy is not universally shared. “Learning how to
read and write and basic mathematics is useful,” one student said. “But why
should I care about Plato’s concept of the soul?”
I conceded to the class that learning
philosophy for the sake of erudition may not be the best use of their time.
“But if you want to build a just and
democratic society, isn’t it useful to get as clear as possible on what you
mean by justice and democracy and to examine if you have good reasons to pursue
these?” I asked. “And aren’t your intuitions about knowledge, goodness and
beauty worth investigating?”
Well, perhaps. But first the students
had more questions for me. Is it true that Canadian bacon is the best in the
world? What do people abroad think about Brazil? How did I get into philosophy?
And—still more personally—do I believe in God, a question I encountered almost
every time. I tried to get out of it by mentioning Spinoza’s impersonal God.
That didn’t mean much to the students and, truth be told, I don’t even believe
in the God of Spinoza. “We knew it—all philosophers are atheists!” they would
say. When I asked who was a Catholic, who was an evangelical, and who practiced
the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé (Salvador alone has more than 2000 terreiros,
Candomblé’s houses of worship), all students raised their hand at least once.
I assured the students that until the
nineteenth century hardly any philosopher was an atheist. Plato’s Euthyphro—with
its argument about the relationship between ethics and the will of the
gods—gets us into a lively discussion.
I asked them, “Do moral norms depend on
God’s will? Would it be fine to murder an innocent child if God says so?” The
students found the idea outrageous.
“But doesn’t God order Abraham to
sacrifice Isaac?” I asked. There was a moment of confusion.
“But Abraham also holds God responsible
when he wants to destroy Sodom and Gomorra,” one student replied. That can be
interpreted as an independent norm of justice, I admitted.
I pressed on. “But if God must submit to
objective moral norms, do we still need the Bible for moral guidance?”
Another student doubted that reason can
replace the Bible: “Reason even justifies killing an innocent child if that’s
the only way to save a thousand lives.”
We assumed for the moment that reason is
indeed unable to ground absolute moral norms. “But how can we act on the
authority of the Bible if there are so many different interpretations of it?” I
asked. A third student intervened: “Can’t each interpretation be right in its
own time and place?” I reminded them of Salvador’s Museum of Modern Art, which
they visited on a class excursion. It is located in a beautifully restored casa
grande—a colonial plantation owner’s mansion—with adjacent slave
dormitories—senzala. “You remember the private chapel? Going to mass and
having slaves obviously wasn’t a contradiction back then.” Most students have
slaves among their ancestors. So they were reluctant to concede that an
interpretation of the Bible allowing slavery is valid. “Is, then, reason the
arbiter between competing interpretations?” I asked.
We hadn’t reached a conclusion when the
bell rang, but we’d touched on a wide range of important issues in an
open-ended Socratic discussion that seemed well suited to the public philosophy
envisioned in the 2008 law. By giving students the basic semantic and logical
tools they need to clarify their intuitions and to analyze arguments for and
against their views, philosophy could help to extend and refine the debate that
naturally arises in a pluralistic society from conflicting interests, values,
and worldviews. And it could also help citizens make wise use of the power they
have in a democracy, as Ribeiro’s town hall exercise shows.
But can philosophy really become part of
ordinary life? Wasn’t Socrates executed for trying? Athenians didn’t thank him
for guiding them to the examined life, but instead accused him of spreading
moral corruption and atheism. Plato concurs: Socrates failed because most
citizens just aren’t philosophers in his view. To make them question the
beliefs and customs they were brought up in isn’t useful because they can’t
replace them with examined ones. So Socrates ended up pushing them into
nihilism. To build politics on a foundation of philosophy, Plato concludes,
doesn’t mean turning all citizens into philosophers, but putting true
philosophers in charge of the city—like parents in charge of children. I
wonder, though, why Plato didn’t consider the alternative: If citizens had been
trained in dialectic debate from early on—say, starting in high school—might
they have reacted differently to Socrates? Perhaps the Brazilian experiment
will tell.
• • •
The Socratic approach does not, however,
have much support among the two main camps competing to define the high school
curriculum in Brazil: academic philosophers on the one hand and political
activists and educators on the other.
For academic philosophers, philosophy is
not a democratic practice or an emancipatory exercise, but a rigorous scholarly
discipline. According to the narrative I hear time and again, philosophy
started in Brazil in the 1930s, when French scholars founded the philosophy
department at the University of São Paulo. They put an end to the “dilettante
period” characterized by the oratory of lawyers and the scholasticism of
priests that had dominated Brazilian philosophy until then. Among the French
scholars were Martial Guéroult and Victor Goldschmidt, who taught that doing
philosophy is no longer possible, only history of philosophy: reconstructing
systems of thought through a painstaking analysis of their immanent structure.
Since then, studying the history of Western philosophy has been the paradigm of
serious philosophy in Brazil.
For political activists and educators,
this leads to “intellectual schizophrenia” as Eduardo Oliveira, who teaches in
UFBA’s Faculty of Education, puts it. “If we want to think we must put on a
German, French, or British head; the Brazilian head won’t do,” he says. Many in
this camp are affiliated with the “philosophy of liberation” movement, a series
of loosely related intellectual exercises resisting local dictatorships and
what is seen as the West’s political, economic, and cultural domination. This
movement draws on many sources, from Marx to Levinas. It emerged in South
America in the 1960s and ’70s together with the pedagogy and the theology of
liberation. But whatever its merits, I wonder if any substantive philosophical
agenda is compatible with the diverse views citizens hold in a democracy.
Among the greatest skeptics of the 2008
law is José Arthur Giannotti, one of Brazil’s most respected academic
philosophers. He is a close friend of former president Fernando Henrique
Cardoso, who vetoed the law when it was first proposed in 2001, after it had
already been approved by the legislature. “Teaching philosophy to students who
can hardly read and write,” Giannotti said in 2008, “is sad foolishness.”
To be sure, conditions are dire in
public schools. Overworked and underpaid teachers deal with students who are
often in class for the free lunch, reduced bus fare, or because of former
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s welfare program, the bolsa familia
(family fund). More than 12 million poor families get tiny financial incentives
to keep their children in school. Brazil still has 15 million illiterate people
and an additional 30 million “functionally” illiterate who can decipher a text,
but not understand it, much less write something coherent.
When I mentioned Giannotti’s statement
to students they were outraged. They thought he described a vicious circle: if
you can’t establish a just society democratically without the citizens knowing
what justice is, and if you can’t know what justice is without philosophy, it
would be impossible to achieve justice in an unjust society like Brazil if
studying philosophy presupposes justice.
The philosophy law presented academic
philosophers with a fait accompli, so they have been mostly vocal in ensuring
that the high school curriculum reflects their idea of rigor. The Curricular
Guidelines—published by the Ministry of Education in 2006, as the law was
heading for final approval—reflect a broad consensus: high schools should adopt
a toned-down version of the academic program with history of philosophy as its
“cornerstone.”
When I asked Ribeiro what she thought
about these guidelines, she looked amused. “Let’s see what my evening class
students”—maids, taxi drivers, construction workers, and others who hope the
high school diploma will get them out of what she calls “slave work”—“will say
if I ask them to make a structural analysis of Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason.” And even if it were possible, she didn’t see the point. “If the
students can’t relate what they learn to their own experience—of what use will
it be to them?”
But other teachers feel that they must
follow the guidelines if they are to be taken seriously. “That’s what
distinguishes a teacher with a philosophy degree from a charlatan who organizes
superficial debates on this or that question of the day,” one teacher told me.
One UFBA student pointed out, though,
“Nobody really thinks that high school students can get through Kant’s Critique
of Pure Reason. This helps to explain the ubiquitous use of didactic
manuals.” The idea seems to be that if you can’t read Kant, the next-best
choice is to read a Kant digest by a recognized authority. After a précis of
the history of Western philosophy, these manuals usually summarize what the
author takes to be the principal areas of philosophy. In the most popular
manual I saw, each chapter is followed by questions for the students. The
teacher’s version includes an appendix with the correct answers. In the worst
case this will lead to rote learning—one teacher goes so far as to give
students multiple-choice assessments which include the question whether
Sartre’s nationality is German, Swedish, French, or Russian. But that approach
fits the general teaching culture in Brazil. Another UFBA student explained,
“Since the goal is to get students into university, teachers must put
everything into their heads on which they will be tested in the vestibular,
the entrance exam.”
There are plenty of real-life
experiences, though, that could be addressed in a philosophy class. Consider
the myth of racial equality in Brazil, the idea that Brazil is a “racial
democracy.” Following the Socratic call to self-knowledge, João Belmiro asks
his students to sketch their biography and family background. “They always know
much more about the white part of their family than about the black part,” he
observed. One white colleague told me that his black wife doesn’t like to go
with him to the beach. “People think she’s a prostitute going out with a
gringo.” Another white colleague can’t bring his black wife to his parents’
house. “They’re poor and uneducated; she has a master’s in history and directs
an archive of rare manuscripts from the colonial period.” In a country where
races are so thoroughly mixed, what does it mean that skin color remains
important?
Or consider the gap between rich and
poor in Brazil, one of the world’s widest. Many here don’t perceive it as
unjust. In an elite private school in Salvador, philosophy teacher Luis
Rusmando told me, “You’ve come to the most expensive and bourgeois school in
town.” An Argentinian Marxist who once wanted to be a guerrilla combatant (two
relatives, he told me, were killed by Argentina’s military dictatorship) and
joined the fight for agricultural land redistribution when he first got to
Brazil, he doesn’t quite know how he ended up at this school. Although about 80
percent of Salvador’s population are Afro-descendants, the only black people I
saw in Rusmando’s school are cleaners and kitchen personnel. “Most of my
students think that inequality is a law of nature,” he explained. That’s why
they find nothing wrong with the social hierarchy that Plato proposes in The
Republic. “Only when I tell them that wisdom, not money, rules,
according to Plato, they’re confused.” Rusmando is also in charge of the
students’ voluntary community service program. Every few months he drives out
to a farm owned by one student’s family. “It’s amazing how naturally a
sixteen-year-old takes charge of the twenty servants who work there,” he told
me. The students bring donations to a local daycare and spend a few hours with
the poor kids. “For most of them it’s an opportunity to party.” But he also
notices the students who haven’t yet lost the ability to be surprised, and to
question their narrow world of privilege. “Perhaps that’s why I paradoxically
feel close to my students,” he said.
• • •
João Belmiro’s students have discussed
justice. In 1888 Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish
slavery. “But what is freedom worth,” one student asked, “without access to
land, jobs, and education?” All students in his class are in favor of
affirmative action programs in universities. The deterioration of the public
school system in recent decades, which Lula’s center-left government did little
to reverse, has made it all but impossible for poor children to get into one of
the coveted public university programs—mainly engineering, law, and medicine—that
open the door to wealth and prestige.
“But are quotas enough?” I asked the
students. “Isn’t there a risk of graduating black engineers, lawyers, and
doctors who think and behave exactly like their white colleagues?” If
philosophy is indeed the way to change such attitudes, as the students
proposed, what should it aim at? It turns out to be quite difficult to say how
much equality social justice requires.
“Consider two acarajé
stands,” I said, referring to Salvador’s most popular street food. One is run
by a talented cook, the other by a cook without talent. Both work hard, but the
first stand has lots of customers, the second only a few. “Would it be just to
take part of the talented cook’s income and give it to the untalented one?”
Differences due to talent or effort seemed acceptable to the students as long
as equal opportunities were granted. I pressed harder: “Isn’t talent an
arbitrary fact of nature? Why, then, should it be rewarded? And is effort
really more in our control? If one cook has just lost a child in an accident
and now is depressed and can’t work properly—does she deserve to be punished?”
The bell rang. One more inconclusive discussion, and another invitation to
continue the philosophical conversation.
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