Dom Helder Câmara, alfabetização e ensino superior no Brasil: "Deem cobertura ao indispensável e inadiável trabalho de conscientização" (19641985)

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on Dom Helder Câmara and education. The research problem guiding this study consists of discussing the purposes of education, especially literacy and higher education, defended by Dom Helder in his speeches delivered between 1964 and 1985. The study seeks to answer this problem through the following general objective: to analyze Dom Helder Câmara’s interventions in educational debates, emphasizing his actions in defense of literacy and higher education based on his speeches from 1964 to 1985. In addition, the following specific objectives are established: 1) to reconstruct certain aspects of Dom Helder Câmara’s intellectual trajectory, especially during the period in which he became involved in the struggle against social injustices and the military dictatorship; 2) to present the debates promoted by Dom Helder Câmara regarding the issue of literacy in Brazil; and 3) to examine Dom Helder Câmara’s discussions concerning higher education. From a methodological perspective, this research is based on the analysis of Dom Helder Câmara’s speeches, in handwritten and typewritten formats, understood as social practices that express forms of engagement, contents, and modes of expression in his public interventions during the period covered by this dissertation, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory. The analytical process indicated that Dom Helder’s shift was associated with changes in both his individual trajectory and a “bundle of trajectories,” arguing that the institutional guidelines of the Church shaped the actions of this prelate while, at the same time, his practices and positions contributed to redefining the directions and discourses of the institution itself. This implied considering Dom Helder as a Catholic intellectual, both because of his position within the religious and educational fields and because he possessed symbolic and cultural capital, especially evident in his stance in favor of literacy and higher education. Thus, through his speeches defending literacy and higher education, he propagated the idea that the purposes of education were linked to conscientization and liberation. Literacy could not be understood merely as the mechanical learning of reading and writing, but rather as a formative process capable of developing the ability to reflect, interpret, and intervene in reality. This same mission extended to higher education, since the university, as a privileged space for the production and circulation of knowledge, was called upon to foster critical thinking, social commitment, and ethical responsibility. Therefore, both literacy and higher education were articulated around a common educational project in which knowledge was conceived as an instrument of emancipation and social transformation, reaffirming education as a practice committed to social justice and the construction of a more democratic society.