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While public universities in Brazil offer free tuition, most Brazilians face structural barriers to accessing higher education.

A quota system allows a percentage of public schoolstudents into universities, but admissions those from wealthy, white, private school backgrounds. In particular, Black and Indigenous people face barriers to entering university due to racism and the legacies of colonialism.

The Rede Emancipa de Educação Popular (Emancipa Popular Education Movement) emerged to help working-class Brazilians overcome exclusionary entrance exams, and to fight for the democratisation of access to higher education.

Nicolas Calabrese is a coordinator of Rede Emancipa in the Rio de Janeiro region since 2014, and an activist in the Socialist Left Movement, a revolutionary tendency within the Socialism and Liberty Party in Brazil.

Calabrese spoke to 91������̳’s Ben Radford about Emancipa’s work and the challenges facing the popular movement for education.

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Can you tell us about Emancipa’s history?

It emerged in 2007 as a breakaway from a course that operated within the University of São Paulo (USP) helping students prepare for the entrance exam. At that time, there were many entrance exams, and the USP has a very complex and exclusionary test.

The USP is one of the best in the country and one of the most elitist.

The course was free of charge and grew quite large, and some of the coordinators started to consider charging a monthly fee to raise money to improve things. However, another group of teachers opposed this idea, as it would be another exclusion factor.

In the end, they approved the fee, leading to a group of teachers breaking away to form Rede Emancipa.

Emancipa was born with the idea of being completely free and located in a peripheral area, where the children of the working class live. This way, they wouldn’t have to travel to a place like USP, which is further away and somewhat inaccessible.

In that initial phase, the goal wasn’t just to help a small group of students prepare and get into university. The larger objective was to challenge the exclusion of higher education and universities in Brazil.

There are very few [university] places, and these entrance exams are so exclusionary and elitist precisely because there isn’t enough investment in public higher education to create more spots for everyone who wants to study.

Emancipa emerged with that critique and those politics. There was a need for a social movement to fight for more investment in higher education and for the democratisation of access to it.

What kind of work is Emancipa involved in now?

Our main focus is to help students prepare for the entrance exams. There is a standardised exam, but some universities still have their own. We have a schedule with the subjects that are assessed in these entrance exams, like maths, sociology, history and geography.

We have two curriculum periods that we call ��í�����ܱ��� (circles) and tiempo de construcción (construction time) or tiempo libre (free time).

The circles are designed to bring up current issues, some of which are controversial, that are being discussed in the public discourse, on social media, in the media and on the streets. We have a debate without interruptions, where each student has time to speak, with respect for diverse opinions, practising the ability to debate.

The circles offer this opportunity to debate important issues, from a political perspective as well. We don’t believe in an objective view — our subjectivity and political stance come into play in our readings of various topics, but we always encourage a diversity of opinions.

Construction time is for students to take an active role in shaping the course itself. They participate in organising lunches and planning classes, and they can give their opinions on how the course operates.

[We also have an] education program for young people kept inside what is essentially like a juvenile prison. Since minors cannot technically be imprisoned, it’s called a “socio-educational system”, though they are still deprived of their liberty. They receive terrible treatment from the officers and institutions, resulting in high recidivism rates.

We are trying to challenge that situation and do work focused on culture, debate and civic education, opening new horizons and opportunities for these young people deprived of their freedom.

We also have other projects, such as academic support for primary and secondary school children.

Another program is Emancipa University, where we bring together the perspectives of academics from the universities in São Paulo and other renowned institutions — important intellectuals at the national level — with the viewpoints of popular leaders and social movements from Emancipa. The aim is to bridge the gap between universities and academic thought and the more common or everyday thinking that is present in peripheral areas.

We also had a project called Emancipa Sports, a free sports program located in peripheral areas where the working class live.

Emancipa’s work is always evolving, always renewing itself, with the aim of becoming a tool for the self-organisation of young people and adults in peripheral areas, primarily to fight for education.

We encourage students and educators to step out of passivity and become active citizens, fighting to secure some of the rights that they have been denied.

What are some of your achievements?

First and foremost, every student who goes through Emancipa leaves with a transformed outlook, even if they haven’t spent much time with us or only attended a few classes; and even if they leave Emancipa without fully agreeing with everything we fight for (which isn’t the goal anyway [as] we don’t expect all students to leave 100% convinced of all our struggles).

In the traditional system, the teacher passes on content and information, and the students remain silent — listening and absorbing, without questioning. We are very critical of that.

The debates and the discussions that arise in the circles — where there are disagreements, but where students learn to debate respectfully and always look to question things — that brings about an immediate transformation.

They learn to form their own arguments, rather than just following whoever defends a certain idea.

The concrete achievements are that many students have gained entry to the best universities in the country, into the best courses.

Many of these students have come back as coordinators and teachers in Emancipa.

In some of the older courses in São Paulo, we now have a third generation of students who have returned. This achievement is very significant [for] students who manage to overcome the huge and difficult barrier of entering public university as children of the working class.

Beyond their individual achievement, they come to understand the importance of having a collective project, of helping more children of the working class overcome that barrier, as a form of class solidarity.

Another major achievement is the growth of Emancipa at a national level. We now have about 50 popular education initiatives in 10 different states, in all five of Brazil’s regions.

What are some of the difficulties you face?

The first is the fact that we are all volunteers.

We organise a timetable with many subjects for many students, with all the teachers being volunteers. It’s not easy, and demands a lot of energy and militant dedication.

Times of low ebb or demobilisation of the working class or popular struggles have an impact within our social movement. We see fewer students, fewer extracurricular activities and the teachers are less energetic, either in delivering good lessons, participating in important debates, or volunteering.

The most difficult current challenge is resisting co-option. There is a lot of pressure from the government, which is a very broad coalition — one that includes liberal sectors and sectors from the right.

[The government’s] discourse is often about being against fascism, against the far right, represented here by [Jair] Bolsonaro and Bolsonarismo, but also present across the world.

Against this regression we must all unite. In fact, we believe it is important to build broad unity to combat and fight against those ideas that belong to the ruling class but also find their way into the thinking and opinions of the working class.

There are sectors of our class that are convinced by this far-right, neo-fascist thinking. It’s important to combat these ideas and fight against these sectors of the ruling class that want to attack the rights of the working class.

But we must keep our principles firm, otherwise this broad unity with diverse groups could mean we start to compromise on our struggles, to blur and confuse our political goals and to accept attacks on education just to maintain unity against fascism.

This is a huge pressure that we are strongly resisting, to stop making certain criticisms, to set aside certain struggles or principles, just to be able to receive public funding.

Since the government is centre-left, there is this pressure to compromise and, in our view, to degenerate in order to get a share of public funds. This is a huge pressure we are facing in order to keep our original principles of fighting for the total democratisation of access to public universities and the end of university entrance exams.