The Pedagogy of the Landless as a Democratic Experience and Rooting of Work
This paper interrogates the links between education, democracy and work as they unfold in a school of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil, in order to identify how these three social spheres influence each other. To do so, we analyze the thoughts of John Dewey (1859-1952) and Simone Weil (1909-1943), indirectly mobilized by the Landless to create what they call the “pedagogy of the countryside”, a democratic praxis that articulates education and work and that they apply in hundreds of schools across Brazil. We will first start from theoretical considerations to show the social and political importance of thinking about institutions that foster attentional capacities in order to understand in return how these capacities, far from being purely individual, have effects on the quality of social links and collective life. This vision of the articulation between democracy, education and work through attention is found at the heart of several educational institutions run by the Landless Movement in Brazil.