The “Reality” of a Public School in Rio

The term “reality” is such a deceptively subjective word.  While it is true that our group of 13 students and two professors may attend the same lectures, tour the same organizations, and even sit down to most of the same meals, each event is filtered through 15 completely different perspectives.  As such, each of us bring back a different “reality” from the day’s events, and will do the same even at the end of this trip.  At the same time, by sharing, sorting, and evaluating our interpretations, we chip away at our own misconceptions and come closer to a clearer picture of the “real” Rio de Janeiro. 

Our last day at PUC-Rio

The uniqueness of my Rio “reality” was clearly evident in today’s visit to the public middle school Escola Municipal Rivadavia Correa.  As a future educator of Spanish and English as a Foreign Language (EFL), my perceptions were influenced by pedagogy and language, whereas other students gravitated toward issues of finance and health.

To first provide a little background on the school, Escola Municipal Rivadavia Correa serves 200 students from ages 11 to 15, mostly from the lower-middle social class.  This school was actually chosen over a year ago as one of the 10 worst public schools in Rio to be part of a pilot education initiative.  With the initiative, the school day was changed from the typical 4 or 4½ hours to an 8-hour day, meaning that the students now attend school from 8am to 4pm (instead of in morning or afternoon shifts).  In its second “experimental” year of the pilot program, the school is now considered the second best public school in Rio de Janeiro.  Students take seven classes a day with subjects ranging from the typical core classes to required P.E. and EFL, to “electives” like photography, cinema, and Mandarin.  Class sizes range from about 25 to 30 students, which is much smaller than most public schools in Rio. 

A class we visited at Escola Municipal Rivadavia Correa

While there were many fascinating stories that I could share about our tour of the school and the few words that I was able to exchange with some students, I would actually like to spend the bulk of my blog on the school library.  While the library was definitely limited in scope by Omaha standards, what actually surprised me the most was the multitude of American books (translated into Brazilian Portuguese) that decorated the bookshelves and were postered on the wall.  From Eragon to The Shack, Twilight to Moby Dick, and even books by romance writer Nicolas Sparks, the amount of recognizable books was astonishing.  The library also had the translated (and apparently highly popular) Harry Potter series and even a poster of the famous Argentinian Mafalda cartoon. 

These observations brought to mind several unanswered questions about our own literary culture in the U.S.  Why is it that American libraries (and cinemas, for that matter) do not have an extensive repetoire of translated works from other countries...?  (Or of non-Caucasian authors, for that matter...but that’s a discussion for another day.)  In my Spanish classes, for instance, I have had my eyes opened to brilliant works by authors from Colombia, Nicaragua, Mexico, Spain...and yet, rarely do we see non-American or non-European texts advertised in the public mainstream.  Indeed, our multicultural representation seems to be much less than that of even this tiny, poorly-stocked library in a Rio public school.  I find it sadly ironic that in the U.S.—a country considered a proud “salad bowl” cultures—the mainstream culture is still so heavily eurocentric.

At the same time, this observation also made me reflect on our pre-trip readings of the book Brazil on the Rise: The Story of a Country Transformed (Rohter, 2012), which stated that "Brazilians...like to argue that theirs is 'not a country of readers'" (p. 131).  The author also stated that Brazil is not particularly renowned for their literature in general.  These statements strike me as overly generic, but maybe a lack of Brazilian literature could explain the existence of so much American literature in the library.  Rohter also described Brazil as being “culturally cannibalistic,” meaning that the country absorbs worldwide influences, taking aspects of other cultures and turning them into something uniquely Brazilian.  "As [Brazilians] see it," Rohter says, "their relationship with the rest of the world is one in which they avidly consume and digest artistic artifiacts coming from abroad--whether French novels in the nineteenth century or Hollywood movies and British pop music in the twentieth--and in doing so transform them into something different, something that acquires a uniquely Brazilian character and flavor" (p. 108).

One of many colorful classrooms at Escola Municipal Rivadavia Correa

Aside from these thoughts, there were a few other observations that deserve a passing mention.  For instance, the EFL books that were used in the students’ English classes--while recent and seemingly of good academic quality--were completely Brazilian-centered in terms of culture.  For instance, instead of including information about English-speaking countries and customs, the context of the chapter examples were Rio or Sao Paulo tourist attractions, maps of Brazil, etc.  Although the EFL teacher said that she tried to include discussions of English-speaker culture in her classes, I didn’t feel that such a vague answer was truly satisfactory. Hopefully, though, the same multiculturalism that can be seen in the school library is also evident in the EFL classes.

On the wall of the school teaching center, a quote from world-renowned Brazilian educator and human rights activist Paulo Freire reads: "Mudar é difícil mas é possivel," or "To change is hard, but it is possible."  As Escola Municipal Rivadavia Correa has already shown, change is indeed possible if one has the means and the motivation.  While the experiences that we have taken away from this visit are all going to be different, it's safe to say that we have all seen how change--while difficult--is indeed a reality. 

My roommate Molly and I (from left), outside the teaching center