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-year-old children) at the Rainha da Paz School led to a formal inquiry by the political police into the book's author and the institute's teachers. 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 This paper is based on new documents such as the unpublished police folders surviving in the State Archive of São Paulo on Caneco and on Marinho's previous work O Gênio do Crime (The Genius of Crime 1969).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 Freire's 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, suggesting that we should be prepared to defend spaces and places of educational freedom again in the contemporary world.