Interview with Salomao Hage

Salomau Hage is organizing our next days in Belem

Interview with Salomao Hage, Federal university of Pará

Salomao Hage works at the university, and with the Chamber of the State Government of Pará responsible for Adult Education, Culture and Sports. The chamber is also responsible for coordination of activities in remote areas.

He explains the challenges related to a diverse cultural population, where 40 % of the population above 15 years haven’t finish 4 years of primary education. Brasil is an emergent  economy, and the country is rich in resources, but social inequality is manifest. The problems are not simple, they appear in one way in an urban area, another in rural areas – and also in different forms in the great variety of cultural backgrounds present in the society in Brazil.

Popular Education

Salomao stresses that adult education in the Para region is popular education based on the ideas of Paulo Freire. Popular education should meet the needs of the specific groups of people involved.

His identification of different groups with different kind of problems include The river people, descended slaves, the indigoes people,  Landless people, mining workers, unskilled workers in out-skirt areas and criminals. He offers to organize the next couple of days for us, so we can visit different programs.

FISC and CONFINTEA VI

Salomao is very engaged in the FISC conference, and the exchange of experiences in literacy and other programs between the NGO’s. But CONFINTEA’s importance has to do with the necessity of committing all governments to support popular education and the social work of the NGO’s .