The place to become a person…

The streets no longer exist as a public social space, where each child would meet neighbors and friends; the older boys, the younger classmates; the shyest, the least embarrassed; the unskilled sports players and the aces; the richest one, the poorest one. The street was a place of meeting, identifying with others, accepting differences, building equalities, acknowledging rules. Sharing responsibilities, leaving family life and becoming a social being, that is, of exercising the healthy coexistence necessary for the construction of our individuality in the essential reference of the presence of the other.

The experience of the street has become impoverished, the relationship between relatives has diminished – the large clans, made of many cousins, uncles, relatives and even associates, have given way to small, isolated family nuclei, in which their few components barely meet in a day’s period…

Without the street or family to enrich their life experience, students also do not find the time and space to do so in the school institution.

The hostile place that the street has become further aggravates this lack of possibilities for children and young people, who are prevented from starting the exercise of coming and going (to school, a friend’s house, the library, etc.). They are always transported from the starting point to the destination by parents or drivers, without any chance to participate more actively in the construction of their paths…

Monitored, controlled, some fulfill extensive schedules, activities, obligations, which stiffen them prematurely, which transform their joy into anxiety, their inexperience into fear, their passivity into inertia, their interaction with others into dehumanized intolerance, their meager repertoire of experiences into a lacking worldview…

Terê Fogaça de Almeida