Educar Institute

The Educar (“To Educate”) Institute is a high school conceived, built and operated by the MST that combines academic education with technical formation in agriculture (agropecuária) with a focus (habilitação) in agroecology. Since the first group began its studies in 2005, three classes have graduated with a total of about 120 peasant youth and young adults now providing technical assistance to agrarian reform settlements and other peasant communities throughout the state (such as Alan, for example, who was doing the inspection of the organic rice paddies at Filhos de Sepé). The school’s “daring proposal” is to form “peasant technicians seeking to question and debate the sustainable viability, as well as the political, economic, technical and productive viability of the current model of agriculture.” (This and all other quotes in this entry from the “Cartilha No. 1” produced by the Instituto Educar itself.)

The Institute is located in the Nossa Senhora Aparecida Settlement in the highlands of north Rio Grande do Sul, one of the oldest agrarian reform settlements conquered through the peasant occupations from which the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) would eventually be born in 1984. This is a region of deep fertile soils and rolling hills, marking a strong contrast with the low wetlands near Porto Alegre. Here, a “breadbasket” region of the country, agribusinesses still flourish with massive industrial monocultures of wheat, oats, (and during the summer) corn and soy. The community life and diversity of fruit, vegetable and animal production (especially milk) from the agrarian reform settlements contrasts harshly, then, with the endless plantations of grains, only marked by few empty farm houses used sporadically by absentee landowners.

“The history of this school has its roots in the 1980’s when, following upon the conquest of land, demands for basic necessities were also undertaken, such as: housing, education, healthcare, community centers, leisure and sport facilities as well as technical assistance for agricultural production. Technical assistance was a necessity for both the settled communities in the old Annoni plantation [where the Nossa Senhora Aparecida and eight other settlements are located] and also for the peasant communities nearby, organized through rural unions, the (now called) Peasant Women’s Movement and Church groups (Pastorais da Terra).”

“This need began to be satisfied when the MST donated 42 hectares of the above mentioned settlement, the area closest to the road and the city of Pontão, and organized “barn raisings” (mutirões) for the construction of the basic structures of the formation center then called Center for Alternative Popular Technologies (Centro de Tecnologias Alternativas Populares – CETAP). The goal was to rescue popular knowledges and to appropriate knowledge about alternative productive technologies with an agroecological dimension. By the end of the 1980’s the structure was built and the proposal for technical assistance for the settlement and peasant communities elaborated.”

“The technical group (agronomists, veterinarians and administrators from CETAP) worked in outreach technical assistance, built a seed bank, realized experiments with organic fertilizers, free range pig raising, grass fed cattle for milk production, biological control of soy pests, organized field days, systems of seed-barter, and a variety of meetings and seminars with the local peasantry for 10 full years.”

“By 2000, CETAP moved to the nearby city of Passo Fundo, where it could be nearer the majority of small farmers for whom it provided assistance (which were no longer agrarian reform settlement areas) and also because of the closer proximity to communication and information technologies. The MST organizers were pushed by their communities to set up a school for their youth, who had no other choice but to leave the countryside to study in the cities, where education was dissociated from their reality. This fact often led students to abandon their education, or abandon the countryside altogether.”

By 2004, the MST succeeds in establishing a partnership with INCRA (the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform), and in 2005 with the Federal Agro-technical School of Sertão, to create its own course for agriculture technicians with specialization in agroecology, choosing the structure of alternating periods of intensive residential education at the school and periods of work back at their own communities.

“The pedagogical strategy is to work on the construction and formation of militant agents with the capacity to analyze the social, political, cultural and economic reality, discerning the alternative technologies appropriate for the development of the countryside without depending on agribusiness. Hence, agroecology is the central focus of the education at the Educar Institute, which seeks to awaken the student’s conscience towards the harmony and coexistence between the ten million species that live on the planet and the struggle against the behaviors that destroy the equilibrium between them.”

While I visited, 42 students of mostly high school age were in residence. The students are organized into “base nuclei” of 5 or 6 members, who alternate on the daily tasks of cleaning their residential and academic space, running their kitchen, planning and leading the “mística,” organizing their library, etc. The students also have work hours (two days a week) and work days (Saturdays) where the groups alternate between operating the various productive sectors of their school: the vegetable garden, three extensive orchards, arable fields, raising animals (pigs, chickens, milk cows and sheep), healthcare (a medicinal herb garden and the production of homeopathic medicines), a bakery and the maintenance of building infrastructure. Every week day the students have classes morning and afternoon on all academic subjects of high school education. This intensive work/study schedule crams into 5 or 6 weeks the work of full semesters, allowing the students to return to their communities for a few months to live and work with their families before going back to school for another period of work/study.

The socialist ideological formation is strong at the school, not only through the communal work ethic and the socially engaged content of their academic education (especially through courses in history), but also through the practice of “místicas” every morning. The mística is an ever changing ritual of readings, songs, symbols and reflections on the history, life and struggles of the peasants and workers. The symbols usually include vegetables, fruits and grains produced, flowers, music and work instruments, flags and other symbols of the community. During Brazil’s independence day while I was there, the group of students who put together that morning’s mística read an account of the series of revolutions in 1848-49, called “Spring of Nations,” finding in that chain of nationalist bourgeois revolts the seeds of internationalist socialist revolution. Instead of singing Brazil’s national anthem, they sang the Internationale, as well as an anthem of the landless peasant movement and other songs of struggle.

The coordinator of the Institute is a respectable and intelligent peasant woman called Salete, who has been active in the land struggle since the late 1970’s, having taken part in the very first land occupation from which the MST would then be born at Encruzilhada Natalino. She has been an active force of the pedagogical formation of the landless peasant movement throughout all these years, from the organization of alphabetization programs while still at the encampments to the foundation and continued operation of the Educar Institute nowadays. The years of stories from the peasant struggles and the detailed knowledge she has of the students at Educar and others within the landless peasant movement kept me enthralled for long hours and many gourds of chimarrão… there is no way to begin to relate such an experience without living it for oneself.