Reviewer: David DeRuwe
When the clock tells me it's a quarter to 4 p.m.,
it's time to pick up my kids at school,
along with other errands I must do -
meetings, groceries, pharmacy, readings, and classes.
I get in my car and I drive 40 kilometers,
every day, going from Jaraguá to Joinville,
and from Joinville to Jaraguá,
to the school and then back home.
I get to the school and immediately open the gate.
My children come running, gleefully smiling.
And in record time,
in order to avoid heavy traffic,
I pick up their bags, put them in the car,
ask them to take off their dirty shoes before hopping in,
they get in, sit down, I give them their snacks,
buckle everybody into their booster seats,
and, finally, I hit the music play button
before continuing our trip.
This would have been another one of those "everyday events,"
had there not been something that needed
not only to be listened to
but to be heard.
And it's about a day of this kind that I'd like to share with you.
Late afternoon, I get in my car,
arrive at the school, open the gate,
the kids come, the smiles come, the backpacks come ...
until I kneel down and one of them kisses me.
And with his dark, marble eyes
open wide,
he tells me,
"Oh, Mommy smells pretty."
"Mommy smells pretty."
Smells ... pretty.
And, as an avid reader of the Brazilian poet Manoel de Barros,
I felt that the world needed to be transfigured.
I felt that I should take my time to experience that present he'd given me.
And moving past the disparity between those two words,
how dissonant that sentence was,
I stopped and asked myself,
"How does one smell the prettiness of things?"
"How would I smell the prettiness of things?"
How about you? Do you remember the pretty scents of your mothers?
So I felt that I needed to change the question
from "What does it mean?" to "How does it make me feel?"
And all of that, just to try to reach these delirious verbs
that urge us to create, to think.
So I took my time.
I carried that sentence with me.
I left it on my bookshelf among the books.
I gave it some time ... and then came back to it.
And going past any logic or reason,
I began to give myself space to listen to what had happened to me.
I was realizing how these words disrupted the normal sense of language,
how they broke with the boundaries of grammar and semantics.
I know ... I know.
This might end up sounding
like notes from a childhood utopia,
or a maternal waltz of romanticism.
But no. It's not.
I'd like to compare this with something we can call
a "childrenly" force.
But what would this "childrenly" force be?
It would be precisely that capacity,
so vivid among children,
to play with what's real and what's imagined.
It's the ability to enact and play make believe
with what is and what could be,
between the obvious and established things
and all the potential things that could be.
It's when a toy car is turned upside down,
when a piece of wood becomes a race car,
when flower pistils become whatever they want,
when strings become cats' cradles,
when sand becomes a castle,
and when a piece of tree bark becomes a little boat, a toy car.
"Childrenly" force is all of that.
This art of playing with the limits.
But ...
I wonder, are children the only ones
able to play with imagination's limits?
Ronald Rael, an architecture professor at the University of California,
in partnership with the designer Virginia San Fratello,
built and installed these seesaws
on the border between Mexico and the United States.
And leaving aside the strictly political significance of this gesture,
we could say that Rael and Fratello
played, literally, with what a border is.
The seesaws are, in fact, built with a similar material
to that used for the wall itself, the border itself.
They not only expose the border,
they also subvert its use and its significance,
and they do it in what we could call a really "childrenly" way.
So both in my son's sentence
and in Rael and Fratello's seesaws
there is an education of sensibility.
It's an education for us to listen another way,
it's an education for us to smell things another way,
and it's an education that allows us to perceive a border another way.
But what is that education?
What's this education that, faced with a barrier, does not encourage us to retreat,
but encourages us to create, including with it.
What's this education that teaches us to look,
to see, and to review everything we have not yet seen.
What's this education uninterested in correcting a sentence,
in building another wall,
but that helps us to install seesaws
between our adulthood and childhood?
Doesn't it sound, at least, a little curious,
that in a TED talk about education -
one of the most viewed in the world
with over 60 million views -
by professor Ken Robinson,
considered to be one of the greatest thinkers alive
in the fields of creativity and innovation,
one question is brought to the table:
"Do schools kill creativity?"
Isn't this question already revealing a desire?
Isn't it expressing a need for another kind of education,
another kind of school?
We see, all around us,
a traditional, budgeted, book-based system of education,
an education that leaves no space for questions.
We see an education
based on conforming, ranking, copying, repeating, and memorizing -
an education that pushes away the feelings, the wonder.
When we look at all of these barriers,
this education that creates even more barriers in our thoughts,
wouldn't it be smart to ask,
"But how can we construct
seesaws of creation
for all of these?"
And if Rael's image carries us off to something very extraordinary,
we can come back here to our very ordinary daily lives
and find examples of that education that makes us create and invent.
So now, let's come back to Brazil - here, to our reality.
How can we handle our limited educational resources?
What should we do when we face
the barrier of proposing
new experiences for the children,
when our budget isn't enough to purchase the materials?
What?
We try, we improvise,
we invent.
We go to recycling plants in our region
and there we find a specific residual product,
generated by every textile factory in our town.
There we find under the presses,
as you can see in these photos,
many, many spools in many shapes, colors, and sizes.
But it's not enough to just go there,
take the material from under the presses,
and leave it at the school for the children to play with.
No.
It's necessary, here, to have a double sensitivity
and understand that children's education
is totally linked to their teachers' educations,
or better, to the education of the adults.
So, valuing the investment made,
the whole logic of investment and support for teacher training -
creating spaces and time for research, for study, and for experience -
we took over 300 kinds of spools
to a lecture with over 200 teachers.
We encouraged them to create, to think
and, most of all, to play.
But how many of them left the talk really aware
of the need for more sensitive and creative education?
How many of them?
How many of us?
What about us?
Are we the kind that promotes "wall" education or "seesaw" education?
Are we the kind that believes in "wall" schools or "seesaw" schools?
Well, education speaks,
or it needs to speak a lot of languages,
maybe even all languages.
Education inhabits each and every territory,
and it has to be an eternal invitation
to broaden our horizons,
to go beyond the limits of words,
of thought, of certainty, of convictions, of pre-made formulas,
and of experiences.
Because if it's not,
what good would it be to have education, on only one side of the border?
What good would it be to have education on only one side of the border,
as if what's on the other side
couldn't bother me,
have an influence on me,
interest me, or affect me?
Well, I bet on, I fight for, and I pursue
an attitude towards education
close to the one that the educator Carlos Skliar already talked to us about
back in 2005.
He said,
"Don't become the typical border patrol officer
only standing there
to watch that cruel boundary
of exclusion and inclusion."
How about you?
As you listen to yourself,
do you know where your "childrenly" force is?
Do you know how to find
your ability to play, while faced with a barrier?
And then, as you are able to see your limits and your boundaries,
could you have a creative posture
capable of destroying walls and building more and more bridges?
A posture capable of destroying walls
and building more and more seesaws?
To end up,
I always like to remind everyone
that there is only one world,
and we live inside it.
And here, inside,
education,
beyond any border or continent,
needs and would need to have,
at least,
at the very least,
a "pretty" scent.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)