When children’s literature encounters political repression: Brazilian insights for critical geographies of education

This paper addresses a case that is virtually unknown to international readerships. That is, the ban from schools of João Carlos Marinho’s children’s novel O Caneco de Prata (The Silver Cup) under the Brazilian dictatorship (1964-1985). In 1973, the adoption of Caneco as a reading book for a sixth-level class (10-12 years old children) at the Rainha da Paz School costed to the book’s author and to the institute’s teachers a formal inquiry by the political police. Among teachers, Maria Otília Bocchini Trotta was disciplinarily sanctioned because Caneco was deemed inappropriate for schoolchildren and dangerous for their ‘morality’. This paper is based on new documents such as the unpublished police folders surviving in the State Archive of São Paulo on Caneco and on Marinho’s previous work O Gênio do Crime (The Genius of Crime, 1969). Drawing upon Freirean notions that education is never neutral and culture is a political instrument to build the world, it argues that education, like ‘culture’, is a political battlefield in which the negotiation of space to define what is appropriate or not for learners is key. Extending scholarship in children’s geographies and cultural geographies of childhood, I discuss how, in this case, the most reactionary positions were not expressed by the police, but by parents, journalists and other teachers, suggesting that repressive forces are still at work beyond that specific historical context. Thus, we should be prepared to defend again spaces and places of educational freedom in the contemporary world.