A educação do campo e a agroecologia na constituição do campesinato no Ceará, Brasil

Abstract

Middle-level education, in rural schools managed by the Landless Rural Workers and Workers Movement (MST), in Ceará, has been building, in dialogue with Agroecology, territories strengthened by peasant agriculture. This thesis aimed to analyze Field Education based on Agroecology as a founding project for the constitution of the new peasantry in Ceará. We walk supported by historical-dialectical materialism, understanding that reality is movement. In the process, we sought theoretical support in: Martins (1985, 1995, 2004); Oliveira (2007); Bartra (2011); Caldart (2004, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2016); Dalmagro (2010); Damascene (2015); Fernandes (2000, 2001, 2004, 2005, 2012); Ribeiro (2010, 2012); Fernandes and Molina (2004); Mészáros (2008); Altieri (2012); Borges (2007); Rosset (2017, 2020) among others. In addition to the bibliographic survey and experience in the Santana Settlement, as well as in the Escola do Campo Florestan Fernandes, informal conversations and semi-structured interviews were data collection instruments used in the research. Agroecology, as a formative matrix, has the potential to be worked on in the social relations of families with the land, life and food production, above all, in the care with the ways of producing them. The agroecological backyards revealed the diversity of crops and small creations; moreover, social technologies showed the efficiency of the peasant unit, in the context of water scarcity in the Brazilian semiarid region. Santana's agroecological transition process has its base in the Escola do Campo Florestan Fernandes and from there it extends to the entire settlement and its surrounding communities and in the reading forged in the articulation with Via Campesina. With this, we believe that country schools in Ceará, based on the Pedagogy of the Movement and Agroecology, have boosted the protagonism of peasant youth who have chosen to study and remain, developing new readings about life in the countryside, new practices and actions capable of proposing alternatives to the challenges of the fight for quality education, dignity and social justice in the countryside and in the city. Therefore, we consider to have, in the protagonism of this youth, the new peasants who assert themselves in the struggle for the effectiveness of the Agrarian Reform and for its socio-territorial reproduction.