Education
According to the MST, it has taught over 50,000 landless workers to read and write between the years 2002 and 2005. The MST also owns a Popular University of Social Movements (PUSM)- also called Florestan Fernandes School (FFS), from its campus in Guararema, São Paulo, named for the marxist scholar Florestan Fernandes - which offers various classes on the secondary (i.e., high school ) level in a variety of fields: its first graduating class received its degrees in Specialized Rural Education and Development in 2005. These 53 graduates had participated in five stages of specialization, each of which lasted 20 days. In total, they spent 600 hours in study/class. Along with the Specialization Course, a partnership with the University of Brasília, the Government and Via Campesina, over 40 agreements were developed with Federal, State and Community Colleges to hold an array of thematic courses (i.e., Pedagogy, History, Agronomy) as well as technical courses of different skill levels. The FFS building was erected by means mostly of voluntary labor performed by work brigades employing soil cement bricks made on the school's premises. Oscar Niemeyer will be designing the Auditorium Building that will be part of the school's complex.
The MST formed its education sector in Rio Grande do Sul in 1986, a year after its first national convention. By 2001, about 150,000 children were enrolled in 1,200 primary and secondary schools in its settlements and camps. The schools employ 3,800 teachers, many of them MST-trained. The movement has trained 1,200 educators who run courses for 25,000 young people and adults. It trains primary-school teachers in most states, and has set up partnerships with international agencies, such as UNESCO and UNICEF, as well with the Catholic Church. It reached agreement with seven institutions of higher education in different regions to provide degree courses in education for MST teachers. Some scholars agree that these MST communal schools tend to be markedly better than its conventional counterparts in rural communities, in both quantitative and qualitative terms.
Read more about this topic: Landless Workers' Movement
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“It is hardly surprising that children should enthusiastically start their education at an early age with the Absolute Knowledge of computer science; while they are unable to read, for reading demands making judgments at every line.... Conversation is almost dead, and soon so too will be those who knew how to speak.”
—Guy Debord (b. 1931)
“... many of the things which we deplore, the prevalence of tuberculosis, the mounting record of crime in certain sections of the country, are not due just to lack of education and to physical differences, but are due in great part to the basic fact of segregation which we have set up in this country and which warps and twists the lives not only of our Negro population, but sometimes of foreign born or even of religious groups.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“Casting an eye on the education of children, from whence I can make a judgment of my own, I observe they are instructed in religious matters before they can reason about them, and consequently that all such instruction is nothing else but filling the tender mind of a child with prejudices.”
—George Berkeley (1685–1753)