Discovering the works of Paulo
Freire, many years ago, was one of the turning points in my thinking as a
health promoter, and he remains a huge source of inspiration to many; he quite
rightly is often hailed as the most important educational thinker of the 20th
century, and we regard his works as essential reading on our courses. I am
wondering what he would make of the current protests in his native Brazil,
where in over eighty cities, people have been out on the streets. Direct action
is one of the strategies for bringing about change that we discuss in chapter
two of our book, which is concerned with how communities can take action, and
of the value of ‘transformative social engagement’ (Warwick-Booth et al 2012). Our
book was written at the time of the pouring out on to the streets of people all
over the Middle East and of the Occupy movements. Given the strength of global
capitalism, these movements might only be seen like a small fly landing on the
skin of a rhinoceros and causing no more than a minor irritation, but the
protests in Brazil have rattled the Brazilian President, who has been on
television trying to placate the protesters. Action so far has been peaceful,
which indicates that Brazilians have some faith that the democratic process is
still intact.
As Freire said, if the structures
don’t allow dialogue, the structures must be changed. Politicians usually
recognize this, and develop means of placating the people who could topple
them. Freire’s mission was to give people with no means of protest, with no
voice at all, some access to that democratic process. As Martin Luther King
once said, “A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.” While people still
feel there is a possibility of being heard, they protest peacefully – otherwise
they riot. And people in Brazil feel there is a lot they want to say, even though
many have been reported as saying that they feel they do not have a voice
anymore.
Brazil is often cited as a deeply unequal society, and indeed, using a
simple Gini coefficient, it’s ranked as the 11th most unequal
society in the world – in other words there are only ten countries that are
more unequal. It comes second last in a ranking of educational inequality where
40 countries are compared. 25% of students fail to progress beyond primary
level. Despite Brazil’s rise as a global economy, part of the ‘BRIC’
countries, and supposedly in the top ten major world powers, the poor remain
very poor. The new-found wealth has not improved public health for the poorest.
A report published by CEBRAP (the Brazilian Centre for Analysis and Planning) in 2012 talks about ‘pre-citizens’ who have no
access to decent incomes, no rights and no access to good social policies. The
‘culture of silence’ that Freire was attempting to dismantle appears to remain
intact.
Freire was writing at a time in Brazil’s history where a
dictatorship was in charge. Dictatorships are notoriously bad for equality; one
effect of the dictatorship however, was at least to enable Freire’s ideas to be
more widely disseminated, as he was forced to leave Brazil. There are now eight
Freire Institutes around the world, including one at the University of Central
England in Burnley, Lancashire. Although Freire’s most famous work is Pedagogy
of the Oppressed, the work that made a huge impact on me is his essay,
‘Extension or Communication’ which explored the practice of ‘extension’ work,
where so called experts go out into rural and poor communities to give advice
and ‘help’. Freire’s point in this book was that the traditional way of doing ‘extension’
work was all about a one way flow of information and he provides an alternative
that informs much of the way that health promoters should, and do, work with
communities today. This work is still relevant and much used, for example recently,
in relation to the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. See an interesting
paper by Troian and Eichler (no date) on tobacco control in Brazil.
Whether, by coming out on to the streets,
Brazilians will effect change in the spending
priorities of the Brazilian government remains to be seen in the coming weeks and
months. The protests are remarkable in that Brazil is seen as the land of
football yet the protests cohere around the amount of money being poured into
the next World Cup. It’s being predicted as the most expensive ever staged
(costing about £8 billion) and has brought people to question the wasting of
public money and the corruption seen to be part and parcel of the government
and ruling elites. Of course, the world economy has changed since Brazil was
awarded the World Cup but even so, there appears to be a privileging of high
finance over the social and welfare needs of the general population.
What does seem apparent is that
taking to the streets has become a way for groups to take action and that
people all over the world have found new means of telling governments that the
state is part of the problem, and
that they will not put up with governments doing things which are antithetical
to their health and wellbeing. Paul Mason’s book, Why it’s still kicking off everywhere, suggests that these kinds of
protests will be a feature of political life for years to come.
Indeed, the Congress of South
African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party have called on
people to take to the streets in South Africa this week to protest about
President Barack Obama’s visit to their country. There’s an undercurrent in
South Africa at present, that the opportunity to create a new kind of society,
post-apartheid, was lost and that the ANC sold out to the forces of global
capitalism, led by America. Many South Africans do not feel that their health,
education, housing and work opportunities have been improved since that day
when apartheid fell. Again, Freire has a useful comment on how those who
brought about revolution can become the next generation of ‘fat cats’ who have
a vested interest in not bringing about change for the masses. He notes that
dehumanization of the oppressed:
“ …is a distortion of being more
fully human, [and] sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to
struggle against those who made them so. In order for this struggle to have
meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity, become in
turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both.”
This is a sobering thought
especially when the chief architect and symbolic father of the post-apartheid
era seems to be entering the end stages of his long life.
References
CEBRAP (2012) The real
Brazil: the inequality behind the statistics, available from: http://www.christianaid.org.uk/images/real-brazil-full-report.pdf
Paul Mason (2013) Why it’s still kicking off everywhere.
Verso Books
Troian, A. and Eichler, M. (no date) Extension
or communication? – The perceptions of southern Brazilian tobacco farmers and
rural agents about rural extension and Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.
Available from: http://www.jceps.com/PDFs/10-1-21.pdf
Warwick-Booth, L., Foster, S. and
White, J. (2012) Healthy Communities, in Dixey, R. (2012) Health Promotion:
Global Principles and Practice, chapter 2. CABI.
