Catholic populism and education in Brazil

Abstract

Education in Brazil has been profoundly affected by populism, a movement which extols the virtue of the oppressed classes and opposes the traditional teacherstudent relationship. This movement has antecedents in nineteenth-century Russian writers such as Herzen and Bakunin. The author shows how populist ideas, often merging with Marxism, were adopted by many Brazilian Catholics from the 1950s onwards, under the influence of Vieira Pinto, Paulo Freire and others. In the realm of education this often led to an extreme form of anti-authoritarianism. While not denying certain positive aspects of this movement, the author argues that its position is fundamentally self-contradictory.