INTERVIEW WITH THE EDUCATOR JOSÉ PACHECO
During his recent visit to São José dos Campos in April 2017, it was possible to chat with the distinguished educator, professor José Pacheco. About 40 years ago, in Portugal, he created an inclusive system of learning that has proved to be a success for students of the Ponte School. Many of his innovations today have been “discovered” anew in the best education centers in the world. More than a decade ago, by luck, Pacheco operates in Brazil where he and his team direct more than 200 educational projects. The “Âncora” project in Cotia, SP, is one of the most advanced.
Our questions:
There is a common perception that the unorthodox system of learning you follow will not prepare students for real world challenges.
This is a statement that I have heard repeatedly for 40 years now. Nevertheless, assessments made by committees appointed by the Ministry of Education always arrive at the same conclusion: students graduating from the Ponte School earn very good grades in the national examinations and at college. I can send the reports of the external evaluation from some years back that prove exactly this: they followed to see the grades of these students and found them well above that of other students, which seems surprising. But I can understand why society thinks that way about our system.
Is there a problem due to a lack of teachers prepared for the new style of interaction with young people?
I always say that the first obstacle is myself, my personal culture, my professional culture, because the teacher has a disadvantage compared to other professions. While the doctor takes the classroom course and will be in practical training later, the engineer takes the course and will do an internship, the teacher starts when he is a six years old in a classroom, spends twelve years listening to lectures, goes to college and gets four more years of classroom instruction and next he goes to teach students! He acts out what he has lived. But there are other problems. In Brazil, one of the major obstacles is the discontinuance of public policies. When a new city government is elected, the tendency is to eliminate most initiatives of the previous administration. This has destroyed many projects of excellent quality. Another obstacle is the training of teachers: the way it is being done is inimical to the needed transformation. And this happens because it is not “isomorphic* and considers the teacher an object and not a subject in a process of personal learning, finally creating a set of circumstances that explain how schools comprise students of the 21st century and teachers of the 20th century operating in a 19th century way. The university, unfortunately, reproduces the model of the 19th century, created in Military Prussia, also in France and during the Industrial Revolution in England. This system, useful to the social needs of the 19th century, is currently an absurdity. In Brazil, I follow, directly or indirectly, together with a great team, more than 200 projects of which about 50 are of private initiative, universities and schools.
What do you think about the financing of education?
Education is a right and therefore should be free. In the Constitution of the Brazilian Nation, the right to education is enshrined and the Law of Guidelines and Bases (LDB) of education says it is a state’s duty to provide it. This being said, and if the way that schools work do not guarantee the right to education, I wonder if they have the right to continue operating at all. I answer the question ethically: they don’t have that right! The question of financing is a false problem, the money we have for education would be enough if we just had modern management. The problem is that schools are managed bureaucratically and, therefore, the money slips away.
Is it difficult to obtain official authorization to operate as a recognized school and officially graduate students?
No. In the projects that I follow, the education officials almost always call me to say that it is not possible to allow a project that has no teaching, has no classroom groups, has no scheduled time, and has no examinations…. I ask them where it is written that I cannot? And the law allows! We came to the conclusion that the people in charge of education are conscientious people, who love their students and therefore, as intelligent people and knowledgeable of the law, realize that we are following the spirit of the law. This raises a question. The schools that have classroom teaching, students grouped in classes, are the ones outside the law! Look at the 23rd article of LDB or the 15th that deals with school autonomy and has never been regulated. Therefore we do not need authorization, quite the opposite, we set all our projects squarely according the LDB and the National Education Plan. And we work from kindergarten to death, from nursery school, passing through pre-school, secondary school, and graduate and postgraduate studies. There is a Brazilian university in Foz do Iguaçu that no longer has lectures, or classrooms, or anything like that. But we have many other institutions that we follow, where I learn and where we are doing different things for the better.
How your school deals with problems like a lack of discipline and bullying?
A lack of discipline is the dear daughter of authoritarianism married to permissiveness. It is the result of excessive control, and it promotes disobedience because youth are subjected to rules that are alien to them. They do not participate in defining the rules. Then, the absence of a democratic relationship is responsible for these problems. Also, the teacher does not teach what he says but conveys what he is. Moreover, the fact that the teacher is alone in the classroom and isn’t autonomous, because being alone makes him just self reliant, cultivates in students a fierce individualism, which converts later into widespread violence, in breach of discipline, which is a manifestation of this violence that is exercised on students. Therefore, it is necessary to review the management model, and the teacher also suffers from this situation. Otherwise the school is a space where violence prevails, explicit or hidden, symbolic.
A special aspect of your schools is the refusal to accept that a portion of students does not learn or fail to progress. How do you achieve this ?
The basic principles of the projects that I follow have this first creed: everyone can learn. We develop a subjective curriculum tailored to the educational potential of each student and to their specific talents. At the same time, as everything is centered on relationships, we make sure that these young people do not learn alone and we develop a curriculum stressing community, knowledge sharing, supporting students in acquiring skills. From this synthesis emerges an idea of planetary consciousness quite different from that which characterizes a human jungle on the way to extinction… because schools are people and people are their values. When these values are transformed into a charter of action principles, and one of the principles is that everyone can learn, the LDB is implemented and the Brazilian Constitution as well.
You enroll poor children in your school, many scarred by violence and neglect. Can you confirm that the environment created managed to develop the socio-emotional skills in these children?
Humans are multidimensional, aren’t only cognition, do not simply amount to an amassing of information. They are also emotion, affection, ethics, aesthetics, spirituality, etc. A child who comes to school not wanting to do anything, unmotivated, sometimes even abused, they are sick and what we can do is try to create an affective bond with them. It is not easy. But by creating this affective connection learning happens. These difficult children, thrown out of school, only need firmness and tender care. That is enough.
The literature on sociopathy defines this psychological characteristic as an incapacity to put oneself in someone’s else shoes or to understand other people’s suffering. This may be impossible to correct in adulthood. In children the manifestation of this trend appears, for example in cruelty to animals and other children. It has been reported that you have enrolled young offenders in your school. What can you tell us about the prospects of these young people?
We have had many cases of youngsters 17, 18, 19 years old who were almost lost, involved in trafficking, and they recovered perfectly. It was not easy, I want to say, that I prefer to work upstream instead of downstream, because these young people experience crisis. A criminal is not born criminal; they are a social construction. For example, take the mother of 14 year old who had a baby and was expelled from the school, and rejected by her family. The school, which is a community, focuses particularly on cases like this to prevent young people later from becoming criminals. I am pleased to know that we received young people who have even killed others or who have knocked teachers into a coma in other schools and yet they all went on to become good citizens. The oldest now is more than 50 years old and is a wonderful man.
We have at the moment a transitional government before the expected election of 2018. Are they sympathetic to positive actions? Was there an interruption of good education initiatives? How do you see the perspectives for basic education in Brazil in the year 2017?
Two years ago the Education Minister Renato Janine Ribeiro created a work team to find innovative schools. I was invited, accepted, for volunteer work, and we found hundreds of these schools. The Ministry has undertaken to monitor the study. However, when the new government came to power, everything was forgotten. But we had a commitment and we are looking for ways keep the projects going. Some were eliminated with the change of mayors. The situation of innovative projects is very fragile. We are trying to create a network of projects for support so that they survive. But the Ministry of Education is pursuing nonsense… For example, this new orientation for high school makes no sense and will not solve anything. We all do politics but I don’t do party politics, because I am not Brazilian, I do not vote. But I have an opinion. I have been involved with politics in Portugal. I was mayor of a town and know very well what is politics in this country. I regret that the Ministry of Education is following a course of action that is a total disaster. Policy decisions without any justification, policies anyway that it is better not to comment on, but I have already spoken…
Is it possible for a teacher in the current context of the school, whether public or private, on his own initiative, to adopt a style that pursues the good methods and results of the Ponte School?
Human projects are collaborative projects; nobody does anything alone. When parents concerned with the education provided to their children, come to me, I always say: go to the school and look for teachers who have not died yet. There are some who are alive. If you join hands with them you can build a project, while respecting those who do not want to, because there are teachers who will not join. And do what is needed to fulfill the political-pedagogical project. I am hopeful, in about twenty years, maybe, because Brazil has the best theoreticians, has the best projects, despite having also the greatest phonies and the worst projects, but this is Brazil, isn’t it?
Why don’t nearby schools emulate the few excellent schools that we have in Brazil?
Usually the opposite happens. When a school begins to change it realizes that the greatest ally of the teacher is another colleague and the biggest enemy is the teacher of the school next door. That is a terrible thing that I experienced. And it hurts. It is a great sorrow that I carry even today, 40 years after the start of the Ponte School project. When people ask me about the history of the Escola da Ponte, I reply that it is a story of resilience and suffering, and, also, a story of our pedagogical intuition and love for our children. More than changes in the pedagogy is our great ability to resist the hostility and the wickedness of those who attacked the project.
Thank you professor!
“ISOMORPHIC” — means an educational training with strategies and methodologies similar to those used in a professional teaching practice.
To follow what the group is doing, visit the site of EcoHabitare: http://ecohabitare.com.br where you can make contact and get advice on how to start an educational project.
Interview conducted by Francisco G. Nobrega, francisco.nobrega@gmail.com