Citizen Philosophers - Teaching Justice in Brazil
In 1971 the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985 eliminated philosophy from high schools. Teachers, professors in departments of education, and political activists championed its return, while most academic philosophers were either indifferent or suspicious. The dictatorship seems to have understood philosophy’s potential to create engaged citizens; it replaced philosophy with a course on Moral and Civic Education and one on Brazil’s Social and Political Organization (“to inculcate good manners and patriotic values and to justify the political order of the generals,” one UFBA colleague recalls from his high school days).
The official rationale for the 2008 law is that philosophy “is necessary for the exercise of citizenship.” The law—the world’s largest-scale attempt to bring philosophy into the public sphere—thus represents an experiment in democracy. Among teachers at least, many share Ribeiro’s hope that philosophy will provide a path to greater civic participation and equality. Can it do even more? Can it teach students to question and challenge the foundations of society itself?
I was intrigued when I first heard about the law and wanted to see for myself whether philosophy could do something outside of academia. My path to this subject is both intellectual and personal. I am an academic philosopher in Canada, with Brazilian roots: my parents were activists with a Marxist student group opposing the dictatorship and fled before my birth, though we returned to Brazil for four years after the 1979 amnesty for political refugees. With the help of colleagues and undergraduates from the UFBA philosophy department, I gained access to a broad range of schools in Salvador, where I was often welcomed as a guest teacher and had the opportunity to discuss with teachers their curricula, instructional styles, and hopes for the students.
In every classroom I was at first flooded with questions: Who is this professor from Montreal and what’s he doing here? the students wondered. I quickly learned that my excitement about Brazil’s experiment with philosophy is not universally shared. “Learning how to read and write and basic mathematics is useful,” one student said. “But why should I care about Plato’s concept of the soul?”
I conceded to the class that learning philosophy for the sake of erudition may not be the best use of their time. “But if you want to build a just and democratic society, isn’t it useful to get as clear as possible on what you mean by justice and democracy and to examine if you have good reasons to pursue these?” I asked. “And aren’t your intuitions about knowledge, goodness and beauty worth investigating?”..
