Project of the Day: The Moleque de Ideias open school in Nitteroi, Brazil

Moleque de ideias is a software house and a a place to learn what one wants to do. From age 4 onwards. In other words, an Open school without curriculum!

Here is the basic description:

“Firm founded in 1996. Moleque de Ideias keeps a living environment where all children, youth and adults can create and manage their own projects. The organization emerges from the interests of each other, creating learning networks for the realization of ideas.

As each person is encouraged to develop his/her own creativity, the company’s portfolio covers a wide range of possibilities. Under a monthly membership fee, children attend weekly to the space, bringing new ideas that inspire adults to develop projects that will help them in their creations. These projects, along with other ideas and demands brought up by adults, pass through a maturing process and possibly develop a commercial or even communal appeal.

Moleque de Ideias provides a wide range of technologies for regulars to explore their imagination and discover new knowledge. Along with the community around them, develop forms of urban agriculture, composting to study, invest in research on new interfaces and devices controlled by thought, RFIDs and outlets assisted by Augmented Reality, creating robots, among other initiatives that use technology , whether high or low tech, to empower people.

These approaches to new learning environments have a strong theoretical base, anchored in a vision of the network society, glocal (global + local), formed by people and groups who use technology to improve the quality of life for all.”

Co-founder Nilton Lessa explains the philosophy behind the project:

“My personal view about what “is being” Moleque de Ideias:

First of all, I would like to state that any definition and explanation anyone could offer about Moleque de Ideias(or any living social organism), it’s suitable and correct. Every definition of a living organism(anyone, social, biological, etc) offered by someone interacting with it, is “by definition” 🙂 correct: because it’s the report of a particular being, and as a personal report of the effects of this interaction, it’s is true. But it’s, also “by definition”, wrong: because living organisms are adaptive, nondeterministic, complex (in the sense of a “complex system” mathematically speaking) and no restraining idea can capture all of their aspects. And if, by chance one definition is the best suited, it will be possibly obsolete at the very moment it’s expressed.

So, said that, I don’t see Moleque de Ideias as any kind of “school” for my experience working here in these last 17 years and for some theoretical and empirical ideas I strongly believe.

* Learning IS NOT equivalent to “someone teaches somebody at some moment”; (I am not “words playing” here)

* there isn’t ANY curriculum: neither open, neither free , etc. The very concept of “curriculum”is completely strange for me as I conceive my work in Moleque de Ideias.

* none separation of categories as “make”-“think”-“learn”-“share” as this separation is completely artificial and only reflects the separation one PARTICULAR kind of society imposes over “living”.

* no pre-defined rules ante-interaction.

I think that Moleque de Ideias (as also others firms like Curto Café) is built around the idea that every(at least, most of the) productive activity could be executed in an open, diversified, trust-based environment, small.

* Open in the sense that since its beginning as a software engineering company the environment was open to children explore their own ideas, choices. To do what they chose to do. And since 3 years ago, I think by the general transformation of the one-hierarchical world to the fractal-distributed-worlds, lots of friends and friend of friends meet here to explore ideas, drink coffee, eat bread 🙂 , little talk, create, work.

* Diversified in the sense that there is no privileged theme, technology or subject that is prohibited or “focused”. Ideas must born and die as organisms; if someone has an idea, go forward. During these 17 years I really can’t say what “we” do: we do what people that lives-works here wants to do. Some ideas-projects generates flow of money; others generate flow of material; others generate “I don’t know what they generate and I really don’t care”.

* Trust-based because it’s all that matters after all, before all, between all. Building friendship is not only “way” or “the end”; is “the end and the way”. And as peace, democracy, etc there is no pathway to friendship besides exerting friendship.

* Small is almost a logical necessity. I won’t advance the whys and because here but in a simple phrase: “largeness” and “uniformity” leads inevitably to the establishment of “closed doors’, “no-colaboration”, “hierarchical phenomena” and inefficiency.

So: no separation of work, learn, create, play. This artificial separation of environment of learning(schools in their most diversified forms but always schools-reproduction of someone(s) past ); work and play is a phenomena intrinsic of a hierarchical and outside-regulated world. This separation hardly emerges in a distributed way of living. (for me “live” embraces “create” that embraces “work-share-learn” that embraces “live” again).

I (for)see that social organisms like Moleque de Ideias and Curto Café, when-where people(no age, no professional specialization segregation) produce-share-learn (a longer and triple word for a simpler-shorter one: “live”) will be very common in the future.”

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