Resistance and Empowerment in a Necropolis: Fighting Educational Inequality through Popular Education

In the past two decades, education in Brazil has undergone several changes. Access to basic education is now almost universal, secondary education has been expanding very rapidly, as well as higher education, at the undergraduate and graduate levels. For the first time in Brazil’s history Afro-Brazilians are the majority in public universities, representing 50.3 percent of all students enrolled in such institutions in 2019 according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). This increase in university enrollment can be attributed to a series of affirmative action programs started by former presidents Lula Inácio da Silva and Dilma Rousseff between 2003 and 2016, one of them being the adoption of racial quotas in admission processes in Brazilian public universities (Igreja & Ferreira, 2019). 

With Bolsonaro’s rise to the presidency in 2018, however, education has been primarily affected due to the adoption of neoliberal policies that have reduced funding for the Ministry of Education. An example of this is a recent approved bill that slashed a total of 2.7 billion BRL (approximately 500 million USD) from the annual education budget (The Brazilian Report, 2021). It is not an exaggeration to affirm that Bolsonaro has declared open warfare on public education, having also reduced 30% of the budget for all government-funded higher education institutions in Brazil, which include 69 federal universities and 39 federal institutions (University World News, 2019). As a result, several of these institutions have reported to be at risk of permanent closure. 

While Bolsonaro has undoubtedly compromised public education, access to education in has always been an issue in Brazil, especially for Black, poor and peripheral youth. According to PNAD, despite 54% of the population self-identifying as black, Afro-Brazilians represent 75% out of the 10% poorest in the country, and this is reflected in access to education as well (Unibanco, 2015). According to the Lemann Foundation, compared to white Brazilians, Afro-Brazilians have a higher probability of either not being enrolled in school, or being enrolled in schools that have the worst infrastructure and faculty. Educational inequality is also represented in racial disparities as only 51% of black individuals are in high school compared to 65% of white students. Additionally, high school dropout rates are also an issue since among the 15 to 17-years-olds who have dropped out of elementary school 57% are black while 43% are white (Instituto Unibanco, 2015). Disparity between white and black students also become visible when looking at differences between residents of formal and informal neighborhoods. In fact, according to the IBGE’s National Household Sample Surveyamong favela residents, 70% of the population has one to eight years of schooling, whereas the same percentage of the population in formal urban areas has over five years and a significant percentage of residents has 12 years or more (Monge-Naranjo et al.). It is worth mentioning that the majority of residents who live in peripheral communities are black or pardo (mixed-race).

Racial inequality in education must be understood as a part of a process of subalternity that is reproduced in political realms of the economy and daily relations (Almeida, 2018, p. 27 in Costa et al., 2020, p. 3). This allows for an understanding of racism as a form of discrimination that is reproduced systemically, unconsciously, and consciously, and that is used as a weapon of white supremacy to cause the social exclusion and slow death of Black people. Racial hierarchization started with the exploitation and predatory pillaging of the African continent, which eventually resulted in the colonization and instilment of a race-based slavery in Brazil. This set of beliefs in the superiority versus inferiority of races was necessary to perpetuate the social exclusion that is found to this day (Santos, 2002 in Costa et al., 2020, p. 3). In Brazil, the prevalence of the myth of racial democracy and society’s unwillingness to address racism has led many Afro-Brazilians to suffer the day to day discriminations of racist oppression but not perceive it as a structural problem (Nogueira, 2013, p. 23). 

However, data on inequality in education, income inequality and violence, has shown not only that Afro-Brazilians are disproportionately affected but that social exclusion is a part of a larger project of necropolitics, where the Black urban poor is prevented from exercising its right to life and to education (GIGA, 2020; Akkari, 2013). This represents a “process of invisibilization of the black youth in the Brazilian educational system with one of its main consequences being their symbolic death, which contributes to other ways of dying in the context of a society marked by structural racism” (Costa et al., 2020, p. 1). To counter such a hopeless scenario, civil society in conjunction with community members, themselves have risen up and made grassroots efforts to make higher education accessible. This has translated into free community-led programs that aim to prepare youth and adults primarily from the periphery to take Brazil’s university entrance exams. These programs are known as cursinho popular or cursinho pré-vestibular comunitário (CPVC), and while there is no official statistics on the total number of participants they have helped access higher education, current literature as well as personal accounts and experiences, have shown the importance of such programs in opening the doors to higher education.

CPVCs are examples of popular education initiatives, which provide critical education that engages students with the real world and their personal reality. Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire claims in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) that “there’s no such thing as neutral education” and that “education either functions as an instrument to bring about conformity or freedom.” In fact, educational spaces often reproduce dominant class value systems as well as historical and spatial processes that have led to the “stigmatization and subversions and to the demoralizing and silencing of many marginalized communities” (Basu, 2010, p. 2). On the other hand, popular education provides a space of contestation and resistance where social and cultural processes are redefined.

This project discuss and assess three cursinho populares (CPVCs) in the city of Sao Paulo  – UNEafro, Cursinho Popular Professora Cursinho Popular Professora Leila Regina and Arcadas Vestibulares. Both UNEafro and Cursinho Popular Professora Leila Regina are located in Sao Paulo’s East Zone, a region characterized by low indicators of health, education, sanitation, as well as widespread poverty and criminality. Arcadas Vestibulares, on the other hand, is located at one of the University of Sao Paulo’s campuses, but also serves a population that is predominantly from low-income neighborhoods, as well as first-generation students. The research questions that frame this work are the following:

• How do popular education initiatives in Brazil perceive empowerment and what are the actual practices of empowerment and solidarity happening on the ground?
•  To what extent have these initiatives empowered participants and helped them access higher education?

In the field of development, the concept of empowerment has been widely contested due to its vagueness and the difficulty in measuring it. Cornwall (2016) explains that empowerment is “one of the most elastic of international development’s many buzzwords” that can serve different agendas from radical to neoliberal ones (p. 342). 

The study reveals that CPVC volunteers understand empowerment in three main ways: Empowerment as conscientization, as reclaiming identity, and as accessing spaces that have historically been denied to the marginalized – universities. CPVC volunteers’ ability to empower students is assessed using CARE’s empowerment framework, which looks at empowerment through three interrelated dimensions namely: agency, structure and relations. The analysis shows that in terms of relations, CPVC volunteers are able to collectively organize and provide community support to students in the form of resources such as food, textbooks and SIM cards for internet access. In terms of agency, it shows that volunteers can help students develop their identity and feel a sense of belonging, and that this is achieved through non-traditional classes and critical course content. However, it also shows that this is not always achieved due to the short duration of the program which limits what can be taught. In relation to structure, the assessment also identifies deficiencies that reduce the effectiveness of the programs, such as a severe lack of funding and government assistance.