Education and the

appropriation of local reality

LADISLAU DOWBOR

I
n the municipality of Pintadas in Bahia, a small city far from the
modernity of asphalt, nearly half the men travel every year to the Southeast
to cut sugar cane. A partnership between the dynamic mayor, some
producers and people with a vision of local needs allowed those who were
looking for work in distant places to then return to the construction of their
own city. It began with a partnership between the local Secretary of Education
with a university of Salvador to work out a basic sanitation plan for the city,
which reduced health costs, freed up land and budget for production, and so
on. The generation of knowledge about local reality and the promotion of a
proactive attitude for development is an evident part of an education that can
become a scientific and pedagogical instrument for local transformation.
The initiative began with a mayor elected by a network of social
organizations, thus directly bound up with the community’s needs. As
retribution the governor ordered the closing of the only bank branch of
the city. The response of the community was to reactivate a local credit
cooperative, going on to locally finance a large part of the initiatives.
What was the relation between this and education? The developers of
these initiatives realized that Pintadas is located in a semi-arid region, and
that the children have never had a class about semi-arid, about the limits and
potentialities of their own reality. Today semi-arid is taught in the schools of
Pintadas. It is natural that teaching that allows children to comprehend their
region, and the difficulties of their own parents in diverse professional spheres
stimulates the children and prepares citizens who will see education as an
instrument for the transformation of their own reality.
In Santa Catarina, under the guidance of the late Jacó Anderle, the
program “My school, My Place” was developed. It is a systematic orientation of
local reality in the school curriculum, involving not only training of teachers
– who, in general, in their own training, also lacked knowledge of their regions
–, but the development of teaching materials, articulation of curricula of
several fields, and so on.
The region of São Joaquim in the south of the state of Santa Catarina
was a poor area with few producers and few expectations, and the indicators
of human development were the lowest in the state. As with other regions of

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the country, São Joaquim and the neighboring cities hoped that development
“might arrive” from outside, in the form of investment by a large company, or
a government project.
Within a few years various residents of the region decided they were
not going to wait and opted for another means of solving their problems:
confronting them by themselves. They identified the various characteristics of
the local climate which were verified to be especially favorable to fruit growth.
They organized themselves, and with the means at their disposal formed
partnerships with research institutes and cooperatives, opened marketing
channels so as to not to be dependent on intermediaries, and today constitute
one of the most rapidly developing regions in the country. And it was not from
depending on a large corporation that from one day to the next can move to
another region: they rely on themselves.
It is important to think of the educational dimension of these processes.
There were times, with the recommendation of World Bank, when what was
called at the time “education for development” was promoted. The vision
restricted the curricula by focussing on more “practical” knowledge for the
training of people useful for companies,. Today this tendency shows up in
large private institutions, like the U. of Phoenix, in the United States, a for-
profit university traded on the Stock Exchange that eliminated humanistic
vision and teaches what is characterized as marketable skills. It goes against the
current, the old dichotomous line between theory and practice.
This vision that we can be owners of our economic and social
transformation, that development needs not wait, but can be done, constitutes
one of the most profound changes that are taking place in the country. It
removes us from the attitude of critical spectator of an always inadequate
government, or from passive pessimism. It gives back to the citizen the
understanding that his destiny is in his own hands, since there is a dynamic
local social culture generating synergy among various efforts that facilitates the
process.
The idea of education for local development is directly tied to this
understanding and to the need of preparing people for tomorrow who can take
an active part in the initiatives capable of straightening their paths generating
constructive dynamics. When we try to foster initiatives of this type today,
we notice that it is not only children, but adults as well who lack a range of
knowledge from the origin of their own street’s name to the potential of
the subsoil of the region where they were raised. In order to have an active
citizenry, we have to have an informed citizen, and this begins early. Education
should not only to serve as a springboard for a person to escape from his
region: it should give him the knowledge needed to help transform it.
In a region of Italy we visited a city where there was a bas-relief of the
city itself and of the neighboring regions on the ground of its Central Square,
allowing people to visualize the buildings, the major roads, the design of the

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local waterways, and so on. Among other uses, teachers use the Square to
discuss the territorial distribution of the main economic areas with children,
showing them how pollution spreads from a single point throughout the
city, and so on. There are cities that produce a local atlas so that children can
understand their surroundings, others are making the production of indicators
more dynamic so that local problems can become more comprehensible and
easier to incorporate into the school curriculum. The means are numerous
and varied and we detail them in the present text, but what is essential is this
attitude of considering that children can and should assimilate them, through
organized knowledge of the territory they call home, and that education has a
central role in the performance of this plan.
There is an important pedagogical dimension to this focus. By studying
the reality that they know by experience in a scientific and organized rather
than fragmented manner, children can better assimilate their own scientific
concepts, since its their own reality that starts to make sense. On studying the
migratory dynamics that resulted in the building of the city where they live,
for example, they go on to see science as an instrument for the comprehension
of their own life and the life of their family. Science comes to be assimilated
and is no longer merely a school obligation.

Globalization and local development

When we look at the press, or even technical magazines, it seems that
everything is globalized; all we hear of is globalization in the world financial
casinos, in the transnational corporations. Globalization is an unarguable
fact, directly connected to current technological transformations and to the
concentration of economic power in the world. But not everything has been
globalized. When we look at the simple but essential dynamic of our lives,
we find local space. Thus, the quality of life in our neighborhood is a local
problem, involving paving, the drainage system, and the neighborhood infra-
structures.
This reasoning can be extended to innumerable initiatives, like that
of São Joaquim cited here, but also to practical solutions, like the decision of
Belo Horizonte to pull the school lunch snack contracts from the hands of the
large intermediaries, contracting local family growers to supply the schools,
which dynamized the city’s employment and economic flow, besides noticeably
improving the quality of the meals–which included clauses about agrotoxins –
and promoted the building of social capital. Essentially the quality of water, of
health, of collective transport, as well as the richness or poverty of cultural life
depends on local initiative. In the end, a great part of what constitutes what
we today call quality of life, – even possible suffering from its impact – doesn’t
depend much on globalization: it depends on local initiative.
The growing importance of local development may be found today in
numerous studies, from the World Bank, the United Nations, from university

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researchers. Initiatives like those previously mentioned have been regularly
studied. The program Public Management and Citizenship, for example,
developed by the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV) of São Paulo, has nearly
7500 accounts of this kind registered and studied. CEPAM, which studies the
local administration of the state of São Paulo, follows hundreds of examples.
The Brazilian Institute of Municipal Administration (Instituto Brasileiro de
Administração Municipal) (IBAM) from Rio de Janeiro follows experiments
throughout Brazil, as does the Polis Institute (Instituto Polis), from Bank of
Brazil Foundation (Fundação Banco do Brasil) which promoted the Social
Technology Network (Rede de Tecnologias Sociais), and so forth.
It is interesting to note that however much globalization develops, more
people are recovering their local space and seeking to improve the conditions
of life in their immediate surroundings. Naisbitt, an American researcher,
came to call this two-way globalization and localization process the “global
paradox.” In reality, our citizenry performs on diverse levels, but it is at the
local plane that participation can express itself in the most concrete manner.
The major difference for municipal districts that take the reins of their
own development is that in place of being passive objects in the globalization
process, they go on to direct their involvement according to their own
interests. Promoting local development doesn’t signify turning one’s back
to broader processes, including the worldwide: it means utilizing diverse
territorial dimensions according to the interests of the community.
There are touristic cities, for example, where a giant of industrial
tourism occupies an immense part of the seacoast, relegates the local
population to the interior and earns money from the natural beauty of the
region to the same degree in which it deprives its inhabitants.
Other municipal districts have developed sustainable tourism and take
advantage of the growing tendency to look for more restful places, with simple
but pleasant inns, assisting rather than dismantling pre-existing activities like
sport-fishing that in addition become attractions. Resort tourism as much
as sustainable tourism partakes of the globalization process, but the second
option brings enrichment of the communities which continue to be in charge
of their development.
With the growing weight of local initiatives it is natural that
from education one can not only hope for general knowledge, but also a
comprehension of how general knowledge manifests itself in possibilities of
action in the local plane.

Urbanization and social initiatives

A good part of the passive attitude of “waiting” for development owes
to the fact that Brazilian urbanization is still very recent. In terms of overall
size we were two-thirds rural population in the 1950’s; today we are 82%
urban population. Urbanization profoundly changed the form of society’s

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organization in terms of its needs. A family in the field can individually resolve
its own problems of water supply, trash, fruit tree production, transportation.
In the city it isn’t viable for everyone to have his own well, if only
because the densification of the population provokes pollution of the
underlying water table by black waters. Transportation is to a great extent
collective, provisions require commercial roads, houses need interconnections
through networks of water, sewage, telephone, electricity, frequently with
fiber-optic cables, not to mention the network of streets and sidewalks,
collective cleaning services and trash removal, and so on. The city is a space in
which a system of collective consumption in a network is predominant.
In dense urban space, the dynamics of collaboration come to
predominate. It isn’t enough for one resident to take measures to end the
dengue mosquito if a neighbor doesn’t collaborate. The pollution of a brook is
going to affect the population that lives along the river.
Thus while the quality of life in the rural era depended to a great part
on individual initiative, in the city a social initiative that involves many people
and the informed participation of all has become essential.
Step by step the rural surroundings have become ever more articulated
with the urban area, as much from movement of farms and the urban
population’s rural leisure as by rural activities that are complementary to the
city, as is the case with food supplies, rural families with income derived from
urban work, or by the necessity of decentralized education and health services.
Thus a space of articulated complementarities is generated between the field
and the city. Where before we had a clear division between the “rural” and the
“urban” what has appeared might be called “rurban.”
In the territory thus constituted, people come to identify with
community and to collectively address common problems. This “learning
to collaborate” becomes sufficiently important to be classified as a capital in
the form of social capital, a “wealth” for each community. In other words, if
enrichment and the quality of life formerly depended, for example, directly on
a rural property and the strength of the family, quality of life and development
in the city are going to depend increasingly on the intelligent capacity for
organization of complementarities, of synergies of the common interest.
And it is in this plan that the immense richness of local initiative
is pointed up: since each locality is differentiated according to its degree
of development, the region where it is situated, its traditional culture, the
predominant activities of the region, the availability of the natural resources
- the solutions will have to be different for each one. And only people who live
in the locality are those who know effectively, who really know which are the
most urgent needs, the principal underutilized resources, and so on. If they
don’t take initiatives, it is unlikely that anyone will do it for them.
Brazil has nearly 5,600 municipal districts. It is not feasible for the
federal government, or even the state government, to know all the problems

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of so many different places no more than it is in the hands of some large
corporations to resolve so many issues, even if they had interest in doing so. In
a certain sense, municipal districts form the “blocks” with which the country
is built and each block or component has to organize itself in some adequate
manner according to its needs, for the entire conjunction– the country – to
function.
Thus we go from a traditional dichotomous vision based on state
or private organizations, to collaborative visions in the territory. The
innumerable organizations of organized civil society, NGOs, community-
based organizations (CBOs), special interest groups all make up part of this
confluence of a society that gradually learns to articulate interests that are
differentiated, but in spite of which still have complementary dimensions.
Education cannot limit itself to composing a kind of basic stock of
knowledge for each student. People that live in a territory have to go on
to know common problems, alternatives, potentials. School thus becomes
an articulator between the needs of local development and corresponding
knowledge. This is not to consider it as differentiation by discrimination,
in the sense of “poor schools for the poor:” It is considering education as
being more liberating to the extent to which it assures new generations the
instruments of intervention over their own reality.

Information, education and citizenship

The American researcher Hazel Henderson presents an interesting
image. Let us imagine a cluttered traffic pattern in a region of the city. One of
the solutions is to let each one do as he wants, a type of exacerbated liberalism.
The result will probably be that everyone will look to maximize their
individual advantage, generating a monster traffic jam, since the tendency is to
occupy all empty space, and the majority is going to behave similarly. Another
solution is to place guards to direct the flow of traffic in an imperative manner
in order to untangle the region. The solution might be more interesting but it
doesn’t respect the different options or even the destinations of various drivers.
A third way out is to leave the option to the citizen, but making sure by means
of radio or video panels that there is enough information about the location
where the bottleneck is occurring, the estimated time of delay and the options.
This type of democratic but informed decision allows intelligent behavior from
each individual according to their interests and their particular situation, and
at the same time serves the common interest.
We will naturally always have a little of each option in the various
ways of organizing development, but what is particularly interesting to us is
the third option, since it shows that besides the first example of “anything
goes,” or the second of “do what I say,” there can be organized and intelligent
forms of action that are respectful of freedom without people needing to be
ordered about. In other words, a good knowledge of reality, solid systems

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of information, transparency in spreading the word can allow intelligent
initiatives on everyone’s part.
Some time ago the city of Porto Alegre put onto digitized maps for the
issuance of permits all the information about economic units of the city that
are registered at the Treasury Department. When, for example, a merchant
wants to open a pharmacy, the map shows him the distribution of pharmacies
in the city. With this the merchant can locate the areas where there are already
pharmacies, and where they are lacking. Thus well-informed, the merchant is
able to situate his pharmacy where there are people who are in need, better
serving his own interests and offering a more useful social service.
In other words, a coherent system of numerous initiatives of a city, of a
territory, depends strongly on a well-informed population. The tendency today
is that only some politicians or local economic heads have information, and
are then able to dictate their programs to the city. Thus a central premise for
development is the democratization of knowledge of the territory, of its more
varied dynamics. And where is the citizen going to collect knowledge about
his region if the discussions about the city appear only once every four years in
election debates?
In this context a recent report from an NGO that works on the control
of public money, the Institute of Socio-Economic Studies (INESC) proves
interesting:

The fact that we have a society with a low level of schooling constitutes
one more challenge, not only to improvement of schooling, but also to
education of citizenship, so that citizens know their responsibilities and
know how to command their legislators and the public power in general,
toward transparency, to the deconstruction of numbers that they don’t
understand. In spite of this, and although we lack a culture of social
power disseminated through the population, many citizens exert social
control extremely effectively because they have a notion of priority and
make comparisons in terms of political results principally when they note
irregularities in the Councils, even without knowing how to read and
even when their own political structures attempt to disqualify them. The
more this information is monopolized, or obscure and confused, the less
is the capacity of society to participate in state influence, which ends up
weakening the notion of democracy, which can be measured by the flow,
quality and by the quantity of information that circulates in society. The
great challenge is to achieve transparency in the sense of empowerment,
which means finding instruments for the population to understand the
budget and oversee public power. 1

The objective of education is not to develop traditional concepts of

“civic education” with moralism smelling of mildew, but to permit the young
to have access to the basic data of the context by which their lives will be

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regulated. Understanding what is happening to public money, what are the
indicators of child mortality, who are the major polluters of their region, what
are the greatest potentials for development – all this is a question of basic social
transparency. This is not to consider the “practice” relative to the theory, but
as a concrete underpinning to the theory itself.

The partners of local development

An education that involves a better comprehension of local reality in
its modes of educating will have to organize partnerships with various social
agents who construct the local dynamic. In particular, the schools, or the
local educational system in a general sense, will have to connect themselves
with local and regional universities to elaborate the corresponding material,
organize partnerships with NGOs that work with local data, know the
different community organizations, interact with diverse segments of public
activity, look for support from the institutions of the “S” system - SEBR AE or
SENAC, and so on.
The process is double edged, since, on one side, it enables the school
to prepare people to be future professionals with a greater comprehension of
the existing dynamics, and on the other, enables these dynamics to penetrate
the educational system itself, thereby enriching it. Thus, the teachers will have
greater contact with various spheres of activities, in a sense becoming scientific
and pedagogical mediators of a territory, of a community. The re-qualifying
of the teachers that this implies could be very rich, since they will naturally
be able to confront what they are teaching with experienced realities, and in
a certain sense be put in the same position as the students, who listen to the
classes and encounter the difficulties in making the bridge between what is
taught and the concrete reality of their daily situation.
The impact in relation to motivation, for all, can be great, above all for
the students who are always told “one day” they will understand why what they
study is important. The student who has learned in historic and geographic
terms how his city and his own neighborhood has developed, will have a
greater capacity and interest in contrasting this development with the process of
urbanization of other regions, of other countries, and will understand better the
theoretical concepts of the demographic dynamics in general.
Even changes in pedagogic proceedings are involved, since there is a
difference between making students write down what the professor says about
D. Carlota Joaquina, and in a scientific manner organizing the practical but
fragmented knowledge that is present in students’ minds. In particular it
would be natural to organize discussions on a regular and not merely sporadic
basis that involve students, teachers and professionals from diverse areas of
activities, from community leaders to bank managers, union members to
businessmen, from liberal professionals to the unemployed, and support these
systematic contacts with scientific material.

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 In the knowledge society to which we are rapidly evolving, all– and
not only teaching institutions– are faced with the difficulties of struggling
with much more knowledge and information. Companies regularly conduct
programs for re-qualifying workers, and operate today on the basis of the
concept of knowledge organizations, or learning organizations, along the line
of permanent learning.
The time has ended when people first study, later work, and still
later retire. A relationship with information and knowledge is increasingly
accompanying people through their lifetime. It is a profound disjunction
between the chronology of formal education and the chronology of
professional life.
In this sense, all organizations, and not only schools, turn into
institutions of learning, considering anew the data from reality. The school
needs to be articulated with these diverse spaces of learning in order to be a
partner in the necessary transformations.
One interesting example comes to us from Jacksonville, in the United
States. The city annually produces a Quality of Life Progress Report (www.
jcci.org), an evolving summary of its quality of life, evaluating health,
education, security, employment, diverse economic activities, and so on. This
report is produced with the participation of the most varied partners and
permits the insertion of scientific knowledge of reality into the daily life of
the citizens. Teaching how to employ knowledge in an organized manner is
the vocation of the world of education. Should it stand on the sidelines of
efforts of this type?
2

Necessary partners have become regional universities, businesses, the

“S” system, various branches of city hall, environmental NGOs, community-
based organizations, local media, the local representation of IBGE, from
Embrapa and other research and development organisms. In the final analysis
there is a dispersed and underutilized world of knowledge that can become
prime material for differentiated teaching.
What we are seeing is a school a little less oriented to formal lessons
on general knowledge, and a little more oriented toward organizing
networking between the various spaces of knowledge that exist in each
locality and in each region; and educating the students in a manner that will
enable them to feel familiarized and inserted into this reality.

The impact of technologies 3

The feeling of solitude of the teacher facing his class with its fifty
minutes and a slice of predefined knowledge to transmit is impressive. Some
are better, some worse in this endeavor, but in the conjunction of this
sectioned universe it has little correspondence with the student’s motivation
and makes it more difficult for an individual teacher to modify the procedures.
This raises the interesting situation of a great number of people in the

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educational area wanting to introduce modifications at the same time that few
changes actually occur.
Its a kind of institutional impotency in which the cog has difficulty
changing something to the extent that it depends on other cogs. The systemic
change is always difficult. And above all, individual solutions are not enough.
One of the paradoxes we confront is the contrast between the depth
of changes in the knowledge technologies and the little that has changed
in pedagogical procedures. The malleability of knowledge was and is being
profoundly revolutionized. Putting aside various exaggerations about “artificial
intelligence,” or the natural uneasiness of the uninformed, the reality is that
computer science, associated with telecommunications, allows:
• storage of gigantic quantities of information in a practical form,
on disks, on hard disks and laser disks, or at web address. We are
speaking of hundreds of millions of units of information that
can be put in the pocket, and of universal access to any digitized
information;
• processing this information in an intelligent manner, permitting the
formation of social and individual databanks for simple and practical
use, with the elimination of bureaucratic routines that paralyze
scientific work. Researching dozens of works to know who said what
about a particular subject, “navigating” between various opinions,
becomes an extremely simple task;
• transmitting information in a highly flexible form via the internet,
in a cheap and precise manner, inaugurates a new era of knowledge
communication. This implies that data from any library of the world
can be accessed from any classroom or residence, or even that a
conjunction of schools can transmit scientific information from one
to another, or a conjunction of regional institutions in articulated
educational networks;
• easily integrating a fixed or animated image, sound and text
surmounts the traditional division between a message read in a book,
heard on radio or seen on a screen, actually involving the possibility
of any school becoming a powerful local articulator of knowledge.
• handling the systems without being a specialist: the time when
a user was required to learn a “language” or simply had to stop
thinking about the problem of his scientific interest in order to
think about how to handle a computer has ended. The generation of
user-friendly programs makes the process a little more complicated
than learning to use a typewriter, but also requires a change in
attitudes toward knowledge, a cultural change which is frequently
complex.
What we are saying here is quite obvious and well known, and what
we want to note is that we are facing a universe that is being laid open with

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vertiginous rapidity, and which will be an everyday universe for people who are
being prepared today.
Only now, however, are people beginning to realize the implications of
the falling costs of first rate equipment, with enormous data storage capacity,
printer, scanner, and above all world wide connectivity. 4

There is a potential for a radically improved democratization of support

to professors, and of a raising of standards enabled by technologies today of the
overall conjunction of the educational world in the country. The fight for this
democratization is becoming essential for systemic change that surpasses the
level of initiative of an individual educator or of an individual school. There is
no doubt that the educator still frequently faces more dramatic and elementary
questions. But the practical implication that we see facing a parallel existence of
a rich potential and dramatic restrictions caused by poverty, isolation and the
like, is that we have to work in “a dual time frame,” doing the best possible in
the insufficiently developed universe that constitutes our education, while rapidly
creating the conditions for “our” utilization of the new potentialities that arise.
In considering the local implementation of technologies for serving
education, the example of Piraí, a small city in the state of Rio, is important.
Starting from a municipal initiative the project involved making agreements
with companies that manage retransmission towers for TV and cellular
telephone signals to install retransmission equipment for internet signals by
radio. Thus coverage of the entire municipal territory is assured. Beginning
from several reception points, a distribution of the broadband cable signal was
made providing access to all of the schools, public institutions, and companies.
Since the management of the system is public, it used the difference in rates
so that the greater amount of profit from companies would underwrite home
access, and today any modest family can have access to broadband internet
for R$ 35 per month. Credit agreements with official banks allow purchase of
private equipment at low interest rates. The practical result is that the entirety
of the municipality “bathes” in the internet space, generating a greater systemic
productivity from everybody’s efforts, besides the change in young people’s
attitudes, greater work facility for the teachers who have the possibility of access
at home, and so on.
What we have today is a rapid penetration of technologies and a slow
assimilation of the implications that these technologies can bring to education.
Thus two not well articulated systems are brought together and frequently we
see schools that lock computers in a room or the “laboratory” instead of putting
them to use in a dynamic pedagogic rethinking.

Education and management of knowledge

At the risk of saying the obvious, but for the sake of systematization,
we can consider that, in relation to knowledge management, the new points of
reference or more significant transformations would be the following:

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 • it is necessary to rethink in a more dynamic form and from new
points of focus the question of what to teach: even in a specialized
area no one can learn everything anymore; the choice between a
”fully stuffed head or a well-organized mind,” what Montaigne called
“une tête bien pleine ou une tête bien faite,” leaves us few options;
• in this universe of knowledge greater importance is assumed in
relation to methodologies, learning to “navigate,” thereby reducing
even more the conception of transmitting a “stock” of knowledge;
• the notion of a specialized area of knowledge, or a “career,”
constantly becomes more fluid when the engineer is continually
required to have more comprehension of administration, when any
social scientist needs a vision of economic problems, and so on,
besides putting scientific corporativism into question;
• the knowledge timeline is being deeply transformed: the vision
of a man who first studies, later works and then retires becomes
increasingly anachronistic, and the complexity of various timelines
increases;
• the role of the student is profoundly modified, since he needs to
become the subject of his own development, in the face of the
differentiation and richness of the different knowledge environments
he will participate in;
• the struggle for access to the knowledge environments is even more
deeply tied to the recovery of citizenship, in particular for the poor
majority of the population, as an integral part of the conditions of life
and of work;
• finally, far from attempting to ignore the transformations or of acting
in a defensive manner in the face of the new technologies, we need to
penetrate the dynamics in order to understand in what manner their
effects can be reoriented toward inclusion, a re-balancing process
for the society when today polarization and inequality tend to be
reinforced.
In a general manner, all these transformations tend to overwhelm us,
frequently generating strong resistance, feelings of impotence, inarticulate
responses. Taken together, however, there is the essential fact that the new
technologies represent a radical opportunity for democratizing access to
knowledge.
The key-word is connectivity. Once the initial investment in broadband
access is made in a school or a home, the totality of digitized knowledge of
the planet becomes accessible, representing a radical change, particularly
for small municipalities, isolated regions, and in reality any poorly equipped
segment, even in large cities. 5 When we look at what exists in general in school
libraries and at the poverty of bookstores,– centered on books of self-help,
translated books about how to earn money and make friends, besides more

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foolishness– we can understand the extent to which taking adequate advantage
of connectivity can become a radical mode of democratization of access to
more significant knowledge.
At the same time, this connectivity allows even small community
organizations, NGOs, small companies, and relatively isolated research
centers to articulate themselves in a network. The problem of “being big”
is already ceasing to be essential when being well-connected pertains to the
interactive web.
In other words, the era of knowledge requires much more updated and
inserted knowledge of local and regional significance, and at the same time
the technologies of information and communication are making access to this
knowledge more viable. In a certain sense education needs to organize this
transition and prepare children for the world that really exists.

The local educational challenge and

municipal education councils
A school director in general is overloaded with day-to-day problems,
with a strong vision of the immediate, and little time to see more broadly.
The teacher faces the management of the classroom, and frequently is
highly focussed on the discipline he teaches. In this sense, the Municipal
Education Council, bringing together people who at the same time know
their municipality, their neighborhood, and the broader problems of local
development, and the regional school system, can become a radiating center
for the construction of broader local and regional scientific enrichment.
These visions imply, without doubt, a creative attitude on the part of
the board members. A document addressed to the Council Head formally
stresses the underpinnings of these initiatives:

It is important to say that the Council performs an important role in the

search for pedagogic innovation that gives value to the teaching profession
and motivates creativity. On the other side, it can polarize audiences, analyses
and studies of educational politics of the school system. Finally, it is important
not to forget the legal and ethical underpinnings of their attributions in
order to establish legitimacy in the face of society and public powers. In this
light, the council member will be seen as a manager whose nature refers us
to the verb “generate” and generate means to generate the new: a new design
for municipal education consonant with the most authentic democratic and
republican principles.

Another document, by Eliete Santiago, 6 asserts the role of the

Municipal Councils of Education as “society’s manner of participation in the
social control of the state. It configures itself as a space for effective discussion
of educational policy and consequently its control and proposed evaluation.
As a result of its deliberative character the expectation is in this sense for

estudos avançados 21 (60), 2007 87

its increasing capability as consultant.” This involves “the organization of
school space and time and curricular time with emphasis on distribution,
organization and use, and the results of learning with an emphasis on the
knowledge of innovative experiences.”
The program “Sustainable Municipal Educators” was generated in the
Minister of Environment’s wing together with the Minister of Cities, which
not only allows inserting a new vision into the schools as much involved with
studying local problems as also assigning responsibility and making infants
and juveniles protagonists in relation to their environment. Thus, for example,
the schools can contribute to elaborating regional indicators and systems of
evaluation for monitoring and evaluating environmental conditions.

The program “Sustainable Municipal Educators” proposes the building of

dialogue between various organized sectors and boards, with projects and
actions developed in the municipalities, river basins, and administrative
regions. At the same time it proposes providing an educational focus by
which citizens can become publishers/educators of socio-environmental
knowledge, preparing other publishers/educators, and multiplying
successively in a way that the municipal district becomes an educator for
sustainability.7

School responsibility in this process is essential because a generation

of people needs to be developed who effectively understand their own
environment: the same document asserts that

all of us are responsible for the building of sustainable societies. This means
promoting the value of the territory and the local resources (natural, economic,
human, institutional and cultural), which constitute the local potential for
improvement of the quality of life for all. In order to arrive at the sustainable
developmental modality adequate for the local, regional and planetary condition
it is necessary to know this potential better.

In the municipal district of Vicência, in Pernambuco, we find

the following statement: “education is the main condition for local
sustainable development. On this basis, the Secretary of Education of the
Municipal district initiated the project “Rural Schools, Constructing Local
Development,” with a view toward improving the quality of teaching and
consequently, improving the life quality of the rural communities.” The
project allowed a “methodological differentiation in order to contribute to
better comprehension of the true exercise of citizenship. The objective of
the project is to turn the school into the center of knowledge production,
contributing to local development.”8
These are visions that are going to solidify gradually, with experiences
that seek in a differentiated form, according to the local and regional realities,
practical roads for allowing education a much broader role as generator of

88 estudos avançados 21 (60), 2007

knowledge for local development and preparing a new generation of people
knowledgeable in the challenges they will have to confront.
There is no “cookbook” for this type of proceeding. In some
municipalities the central problem is water; in others, it is infra-structure;
in still others, it is security or unemployment. Some can take advantage of a
company with clear vision, others connect themselves to regional universities.
There are cities with mayors willing to help with integrated and sustainable
development; there are others in which the comprehension of the value
of knowledge is still only beginning, and where the authorities think that
developing a municipal district consists only of inaugurating works. Each
reality is different, and there is no way to escape the creative work to be
developed by each municipal board.
This said, we present some suggestions in the following to serve as
points of reference, based on knowledge of things that worked and others that
went wrong, with the intention not of providing a recipe but inspiration.
In quite practical terms, the suggestion is that the Municipal Education
Council organizes these activities along four lines:
• Establish a center of support and initiative development for insertion
of local reality into school activities;
• Organize partnerships with various local agents able to make
contributions to the process;
• Organize or develop knowledge of the local reality, takingadvantage
of the contribution of local and regional social agents:
• Organize the insertion of this knowledge into the curricula and the
diverse activities of the school and of the community.
Establishing a support center is essential, since without a group of
people willing to assure that the initiative reaches practical results, it will be
difficult to make progress. The Council can name a group of more interested
councilors, draft a first proposal or vision, and associate some teachers or
school directors with the initiative who want to put it into practice. It is
important that there be a coordinator and a deadline.
Regarding local agents the vision to be worked on is of a continuous
network of support. Many institutions today have knowledge production as
an important dimension of their activities. Here we are obviously considering
the local or regional colleges or universities, companies, the regional branches
of IBGE, of institutions like Embrapa, Emater and others, NGOs which work
with particular dimensions of reality, community organizations.
The objective of the network is not simply to collect information, with
a view to a great data bank, but rather to ensure that it will be made available,
that it will circulate among the various social agents of the region, and above
all that it will permeate the school environment. In the City of Santos, for
example, a City Documentation Center was created, funded through the city
budget, but directed by a board that involved the four deans of the major

estudos avançados 21 (60), 2007 89

local universities, four representatives of civil society organizations and four
representatives from the mayor’s office. The objective was to avoid having
information about the municipality “appropriated” and transformed into a white
book and to guarantee access and circulation. The diversity of the solutions here
is immense, since they range from powerful metropolitan centers to small rural
municipalities. What is essential is to take into account that all local social agents
can produce information in some form, and that this information, organized and
made available, becomes valuable for all. And for the local educational system, in
particular, it becomes a source of study and learning. 9

The municipalities particularly deprived of adequate infra-structure

can partner with regional scientific institutions and present support projects at
higher levels of involvement. There are municipalities that also appeal to inter-
municipal articulations, as is the case with consortia, whose efforts can thus be
reinforced.
Organizing local knowledge normally does not involve producing new
information. Diverse departments produce information, as well as companies
and other entities mentioned. We also have basic information today that
is organized by municipalities, by IBGE, in the corresponding Ipea/Pnud
project, and other institutions, with diverse methodologies, and only slight
articulation, but which could serve as a base. This dispersed and fragmented
information should be organized to serve as a point of departure for a series of
studies of the municipality or region.
Equally underutilized today there are even in little-studied regions old
consulting reports, monographs in the region’s universities, travel accounts,
anthropological studies and other accumulated documents which can become
precious from the point of view of generating comprehension of the reality in
which they live from the standpoint of a new generation.
Without recourse to expensive consultants, it is sufficiently viable
today to charter the methodological support for the organization and
systematization of this information, elaboration of teaching material,
supporting texts for reading, and so on.
The insertion of local knowledge in the curriculum and in school
activities implies a significant modification relative to school routine which is
more inclined to general primers that are repeated time and again. Inserting
the local knowledge that the teachers still lack is the central difficulty. In this
sense it seems reasonable, while organizing the production of support material
for the teachers and students – the diverse information and studies about local
and regional reality –to gradually start insertion of local reality into the studies
through greater contact with the local professional community.
There are schools today that conduct “field work” in which students
with clipboards visit a city or a neighborhood. These are useful but formal
activities and not very productive when they aren’t accompanied by systematic
construction of knowledge of the regional reality. Nowadays any city has

90 estudos avançados 21 (60), 2007

community leaders that can present the oral history of their neighborhood
or of the region they came from, businessmen or technicians in various areas,
managers of health or even of schools that can express the reality of the
difficulties of supervising social areas, farmers or agronomists who know a lot
about local soil and its potentiality, and so on, artisans that can even attract
young people to learning, and so forth.
An important dimension of the proposal is the possibility of mobilizing
students and teachers to research the locality and region. This type of activity
not only ensures assimilation of concepts but also intersections of knowledge
between diverse areas, rearticulating information in the schools that are
segmented into disciplines.
In other words, it is necessary to “rediscover” the sources of knowledge
that exist in each region, ascribing value to them and transmitting them in an
organized manner for future generations. Technical knowledge is important
but it has to be anchored in the reality that people live in, such that its broader
dimensions can be better grasped.

Notes
1   INESC, “Transparência e controle social”, 2006.
2   “Jacksonville – Quality of Life Progress Report: A Guideline for Building a Better
Community” (available at: <http://www.jcci.org>).
3   We developed this theme in the book Tecnologias do conhecimento: os desafios da
educação (Petrópolis: Vozes, 2005 – Available at <http://dowbor.org>).
4  Availability of a basic computer for around 100 dollars, the aim of a series of
international organizations, is in the state of rapidly materializing; solutions of
general availability of broadband access as in Piraí (projeto Piraí-digital) show that
putting schools on the same basic technological level became rigorously viable in
a short time. The legal framework intended to provide internet access to all the
schools of the country, with the resources of FUST, is in discussion.
5  There is a worldwide battle in the field of intellectual property, with various world
corporations trying to make knowledge in general less accessible, through various types
of protections. There is a strong countercurrent in the line of free access to knowledge.
See, in this respect, the book of Jeremy Rifkin, A era do acesso (São Paulo: Makron
Books, 2001).
6   Eliete Santiago, Direito à aprendizagem: o desafio do direito à educação (texto
preliminar).
7   Ministério do Meio Ambiente – Programa Municípios Educadores sustentáveis
– 2ª Edição, Brasília, 2005, 24p.
8   A report sent by Prof. Peter Spink, of the Programa Gestão Pública e Cidadania,
FGV-SP, São Paulo; the program has followed similar experiences in Araraquara
(SP); São Gabriel da Cachoeira (AM); Turmalina (MG); Sento Sé (BA); Três
Passos (RS); Mauá (BA) and others. Access from: [email protected]
9  There is an old and sterile debate over the superiority of theory or of practice.
In reality, there is no pedagogical superiority in the teaching of more abstract

estudos avançados 21 (60), 2007 91

 conceptual visions relative to concrete local knowledge: it is a false duality, since
it is in the interaction that the capacity to learn and handle their own abstract
concepts is generated. This false duality has given place to absurd simplifications
like “in practice theory doesn’t function,” thereby jeopardizing the theoretical
apprehension of the problems.

Abstract – It is essential for children to feel that the years they spend in school help them
understand the reality they face in their daily lives. The child, more than an adult who has
had the opportunity of visiting different regions, interprets the world in comparison with
the city or neighborhood where they live. Their reference space is local space. Although
it is prudent to forbid children from playing in a stream in the city, it only generates fear.
Understanding how the streams flow and the concrete sources of pollution allows them
to anchor abstract knowledge in living reality, and much later understand management
of the waterbasins. Learning this representation based on their own neighborhood and
the streets they know, will avoid having them later become adults who know how to
memorize material in a geography class but be unable to orient themselves by reading
a map, who know the length of the Nile but are incapable of reading a city map as an
adult and who never studied the potentials and problems of the reality they will have
to face. We are talking about a major investment, capitalizing on the child’s motivation
for learning about what is around them, so they may much later be adults who know
the origin of the cultural traditions that constitute their city, its economic potential,
its environmental challenges, the rightness or irrationality of its organization as a
territory, its social disequilibrium. Uninformed people do not participate, and without
participation there is no development. Besides, how can we expect adults to participate
in the development of their regions if they have never studied anything about them? We
will consider the example of a small area in the Northeast, Pintadas, where children are
now taught the characteristics of “semi-arid,” i.e., the actual problems in dry regions of
agriculture, watersheds, environment and so on. We consider how to close the immense
gap at an early point in education between formal curricular knowledge and the world
in which each person develops. The author of this paper is an economist who in an era
of knowledge economics is convinced knowledge needs to be shared in a more equitable
manner. Teaching children to understand their own space can be a powerful instrument
for stimulating children’s interest and promoting citizenship in adults.

Keywords – Local Development, Participation, Local Education.

Ladislau Dowbor has a doctorate in Economic Sciences from the Central School of
Planning and Statistics of Warsaw, is Professor at PUC in São Paulo, and consultant for
various agencies of the United Nations. He is the author of A reprodução social; O mosaico
partido; Tecnologias do conhecimento: os desafios da educação, all from editora Vozes, in
addition to O que acontece com o trabalho? (SENAC), and is co-organizer of the collection
Economia social no Brasil (SENAC). His numerous works about economic and social
planning are available at the site http://dowbor.org. @ – [email protected]

This text has been translated by Cary Wasserman and Valéria Wasserman. The original in
Portuguese – “Educação e apropriação da realidade local” – is available at http://www.
scielo.br/scielo.php/script_sci_serial/lng_pt/pid_0103-4014/nrm_iso.

Received on 5.16.2007 and accepted on 5.31.2007.

92 estudos avançados 21 (60), 2007