Landless Workers Constructing Educational Alternatives for Agrarian Reform, Agroecology, and Food Sovereignty

• In Event: Education for Societal Transformation: Alternatives for a Just, Holistic Future

Abstract

The year 2024 marks the 40-year anniversary of Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST), one of the largest social movements in Latin America. During these four decades the movement has succeeded in pressuring the government to redistribute land to more than 450,000 families, or over two million people. After winning land rights, the movement also fights for access to roads, housing, and agricultural extension programs, as well as for social issues such as gender equity, LGBTQ rights, and youth cultural programs. Transforming education has been a central part of constructing these alternatives (Mariano, 2023; Tarlau, 2019). Importantly the MST has always prioritized eradicating illiteracy, pressuring the government to fund literacy programs that MST activists themselves have coordinated, helping more than 100,000 adults learn to read and write. Currently, the MST also has 1,500 public schools in its agrarian reform settlements and camps, which are all part of either the municipal or state school systems. Approximately 200,000 children, adolescents, and adults study in these schools, with 10,000 teachers working in the schools.

The public schools in MST occupied encampments and on MST agrarian reform settlements teach students to engage in participatory democracy, collective work, critical thinking, agroecological farming, and other practices that support the movement’s social and economic vision. As MST activists often describe, these educational alternatives are always “in movement with the movement of the movement,” or in other words, the MST’s education proposal has evolved with the MST itself. The origins of the movement’s educational alternatives in the 1980s were rooted in a concrete necessity—the hundreds of children that were running around in occupied encampments without access to schools. In 1987, the movement created the MST Education Sector, which was tasked with more intentionally developing pedagogical approaches that were aligned with the movement’s goals.

Over the course of the 1990s, the MST also solidified its educational proposal, implementing the movement’s pedagogical approach in the hundreds of schools that were being built on new agrarian reform settlements. This often required a relationship of contentious co-governance with the state and municipal governments who administered these schools, or in other words, both collaboration with government officials and a constant engagement in contentious political actions to achieve the movement’s educational goals. In the 2000s, the MST expanded their educational focus to fight for Educação do Campo (Education of the Countryside)—an educational proposal that promoted a new vision of rural development through family-led agriculture, agrarian cooperatives, and the sustainable commercialization of small-scale agricultural produce. More recently, the MST began to focus more directly on agroecology in its schools and other educational programs.

This paper analyzes the forty-year trajectory of the MST’s educational proposal, showing how this proposal has change by the MST’s class struggle, the fight for agrarian reform, and the alternative livelihoods activists have promoted at each historical moment.

Author

• Rebecca Tarlau, Stanford University