05/23/2024 – 4:52
Catastrophe in Rio Grande do Sul highlights the importance of teaching about citizenship. Education cannot be restricted to teaching content and memorizing formulas. How are we preparing our young people to act as citizens? It is incredible how extreme catastrophe situations like the one that is affecting Rio Grande do Sul are capable of showing the worst and best of human beings.
There were robberies, thefts, violence and serious harassment situations within the shelters, but I believe it makes no sense for me to focus the column on this section.
The reason is that the number of people whose positive side has been brought out is the overwhelming majority. I am 29 years old and I confess that I have never seen a situation mobilize so many people like the floods in RS. Even my mother, who was never socially engaged, was receiving clothing donations to send to the state.
We had post offices, even the smallest ones, full of donations. We had artists mobilizing their networks to raise funds and donations. We had artists engaging in free advertising to help companies in Rio Grande do Sul. We had millions of anonymous people donating money, clothes and food. We had the press covering it heavily. We had companies donating good amounts. We had people, anonymous and famous, moving to the state and donating their time and energy.
The list is long. I could, without much effort, spend all the characters in the column listing mobilizations, in the most diverse forms and made possible by the most diverse agents.
We had. We have. Will we continue to have it? What is the role of school and citizenship training so that we do not allow the current mobilization to be just a specific case?
I don’t want to come here and problematize the motivations of those who donated, helped and mobilized. I don’t doubt that much of it was motivated by social media engagement, but at least it did. I once learned from a teacher about trying not to problematize too much about motivations, but rather focusing on actions. I agree with him, and the logic extends to the case of RS. The important thing is that people helped and are helping. It is not appropriate and will not do any good to infer hypotheses about motivations.
And after the initial commotion passes?
However, the concern is: what will it be like after all the energy and commotion of the moment ends or subsides? Going further: will we be able to mobilize on other issues, agendas and issues? How can the school work on this?
My starting point is: the Brazilian people have shown how powerful and successful they are when they focus on something. He showed how he is capable of, as far as possible, forgetting religion, politics, differences and simply focusing on benevolence, empathy, solidarity and social responsibility.
Call me a pessimist, but I fear that, after the dust settles, we will return to the same way of acting as before, in which selfishness disguised as rush prevails and leaves no space for solidarity and empathy to emerge.
We cannot allow this. It’s a shame that it took a catastrophe to show that we are capable of acting differently. I understand that people, on a daily basis, are not necessarily evil or purposefully selfish.
To survive with a certain amount of mental health, we adapt ourselves to no longer worry about beggars when they ask us for something on the street, to not think too much about those who go hungry and suffer violence. And, let’s be honest, when we receive a request for help we instinctively look for reasons not to help. To avoid feeling bad about it, we hypothesize that others will help or we simply convince ourselves that there is nothing we can do.
Is not true. And the current case shows this very clearly. We are capable of much more than we imagine. We cannot allow ourselves to get involved only when something explodes and reaches the level of the current situation in RS or when an issue or case goes viral on social media.
What about stories that don’t go viral? And the problems that, although important, have not yet reached the level of that of the southern state? Who will think of them? Don’t they deserve mobilization?
The fundamental role of the school
To achieve this, in my view, the path is through education and through schools. Education cannot be restricted to just teaching content and memorizing formulas. What type of citizenship training is taking place in schools? How are we preparing our young people to act as citizens in society? Going further: is there any type of citizenship training in school curricula?
These provocations are not trivial. Young people need to be taught and provoked about the responsibility they have in building a more just and less unequal society. This can be beneficial both for preventing situations like the one currently occurring and for reducing inequalities.
In relation to the first: how does environmental teaching occur? Did Gaucho students know the state’s structure, architecture and hydrography issues? Parallel to this, there should be training on the three Powers and the function of each one. I confess: I learned this during my undergraduate studies. It is a shame. Do you know who to charge? Which body has which responsibility?
It is no exaggeration: if the above concerns had been addressed within the school curriculum, the catastrophe could have been avoided. Gauchos, equipped with more information and civic education, could have been active agents in prevention. I’m not blaming them, but saying that there is room for schools to work on this type of content and information with their students.
Furthermore, citizenship training can also help people not only engage with viral issues, but also culturally develop more empathy and social responsibility. It’s instinctive to look for reasons not to help, but we’ve seen how we can be different. We all say we want a fairer and less unequal world, but we need to understand our responsibility so that it one day becomes a reality and not just a dream.
Expecting this key turn to occur naturally is, to say the least, quite naive. It needs to be part of a project and through public policy. Education can be a very important agent in this process and must be used.
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Vozes da Educação is a weekly column written by young people from Safeguarda, a social volunteer program that helps public school students in Brazil enter university. The founder of the program, Vinícius De Andrade, and students assisted by Safeguarda in all states of the federation take turns authoring the texts. Follow the Salvaguarda profile on Instagram at @salvaguarda1
This text was written by Vinícius De Andrade and reflects the author’s opinion, not necessarily that of DW.
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