https://www.galeriamunicipaldoporto.pt/en/
I was not an especially diligent pupil. My school was a typically uninspiring British secondary modern-turned-comprehensive-turned “Business and Enterprise College.” The facilities comprised a grim huddle of pebble-dashed 1950s buildings cramped on a hill with temporary “Elliot huts” drifting around its edges to soak up overcrowding. School reports lamented my indolence, using stock phrases such as “George thinks the rules do not apply to him” alongside slightly more inspired barbs like “he has progressed, albeit in the wrong direction, this term.” Homework assignments crumpled into the recesses of my backpack, where they melded with my packed lunches; classroom instructions were swallowed into an all-enveloping inattentional fog. Whenever my curiosity about a topic was actually aroused, it always seemed to be the wrong time to ask questions rather than answer them.
The staff at my school was also checked out and beleaguered, with teachers forever teetering near the brink of nervous breakdowns. They had their reasons. Under his clarion call of “education, education, education” (formerly a Leninist motto), Tony Blair entered office just as I started school, with promises to raise standards in literacy and numeracy through centralized targets and reforms to teacher training. This neoliberal fixation on building up England’s “human capital” eventually delivered results, at least according to its own target-driven metrology. But in practice, it meant that my teachers spent their days preparing for the imminent threat of Ofsted inspections and navigating the torrents of paperwork borne from continually administering what was then “the most examined generation in British history.”1 Whatever honorable aspirations had brought them into the teaching profession seemed long since extinguished. Like us, they were mainly just trying to slog through to the end of the day.
Jaded from the tedium of what Paolo Freire called the “banking model” of teaching and learning, we would nevertheless delight in ridiculing our teachers whenever—usually at the outset of a new term—they would return reenergized from a training retreat and each try some new-fangled pedagogical technique on us.2 These opportunities for structured play and cocreation were unconvincing. “Up on your feet guys, we’re doing something different today,” these lessons always began, laced with the implicit threat that business-as-usual exam prep would resume come the next lesson.
Three decades prior to my experience of the neoliberal schoolroom’s imaginative deficit, the artist and educator Elvira Leite began conducting a radically open educational experiment in a deprived neighbourhood of Porto during the years of Portugal’s turbulent transition to democracy. Her “pedagogy of the streets” was driven by curiosity and trust rather than condescension or a desire for control. Leite’s pioneering work against the “banking model” of education is celebrated in a new retrospective—her first major institutional survey to date—at the Galeria Municipal del Porto, entitled “Elvira Leite: Learning to teach, teaching to learn” and curated by Matilde Seabra. The first room brings together Leite’s own rich impasto abstract paintings and dexterous sculptures; in the second, visitors enter into her unique educational topos. Alongside numerous pedagogical texts published by Leite, the room displays ephemera from her four decades of working with, rather than against, children in various educational settings. A collection of caricatural models of ecclesiastical and other authority figures produced by her students in Porto are especially striking.
Leite’s experiment began during the Carnation Revolution, which, in April of 1974, succeeded in peacefully toppling António de Oliveira Salazar’s forty-year-long fascist “Estado Novo” regime. Led by a group of colonial military officers and bolstered by a large campaign of popular civil resistance, the revolution congealed a variety of disputatious social forces. In its wake, the Estado Novo left behind widespread poverty, substandard housing, and inequity in education, the administration of which had long been dominated by the Church. The longest lasting fascist regime in Europe may have disintegrated, but the future remained foggy. Like most post-revolutionary moments, this was a period in which Marx’s insight that “all that is solid melts into air” acquired an alarming new accuracy. Many aspects of everyday Portuguese life, from education to housing to gender relations, were placed up for contestation and reimagination amidst a brief but intense few years of participatory democracy.3
Like so many others of her generation, Elvira Leite was radicalized by the revolution. When the regime fell in 1974, she was already well established as a painter and arts educator, having represented Portugal at the eighth São Paolo Biennial and worked with the United Nations as an educational consultant. In a 2016 interview, Leite recalled her impressions of the period:
A vital energy filled the streets and there was a desire to intervene and work in the public space where ideas were discussed. I participated in debates and had activist friends who shared with me different perspectives and ways of fighting. I participated but I was not seduced by political party militancy. I was more interested in grassroots activities, and in projects that would intervene locally. I wanted to work with education and culture, in the sense of a critical and active pedagogy that would lead to a better public education; in changing curricula and learning methods, in participating in the reorganization of education in general.4
Accordingly, following the disintegration of the Local Ambulatory Support Service (SAAL) initiative, which had been tasked with overseeing urban renovation projects from 1975–76, Leite was approached to develop an artistic educational project in the Sé neighbourhood in central Porto. In preparation, she undertook a photographic survey of how the many children left roaming the streets in Sé were using their city as an arena for games that they invented and played using foraged materials. In a series that now seems to anticipate Francis Alÿs’s ongoing inventory of children’s games around the world (1999–) or Marwan Rechmaoui’s work on the interface between toys and the adult world in his Chasing the Sun series (2024–), Leite’s exquisite photographs reveal the ludic intelligence, resilience, and camaraderie of urban youth.5 Play emerges from these pictures as a practice of survival. The children’s activities also functioned as an allegory for the wider reclamation of public space following the termination of the Salazar dictatorship.
Informed by her documentation of Porto’s urban youth and their games, Leite resolved that the square in Pena Ventosa may as well become the classroom for their sessions. As Susana Lourenço Marques, a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto, writes, Leite’s project was not about sanctifying existing ideas of childhood innocence, or staging these for the subjective edification of adults, so much as it was about “understanding the child as genius loci of the street.”6
For two years, depending on the weather in their square, Leite met with a large group of children and young adults, ranging from four to twenty years old, every Wednesday and Sunday. There were no structured lessons, but many things were learned. Unlike the drip-feed of “learning objectives” in contemporary classrooms, there was not much by way of traditional explication in Leite’s pedagogy. Having built up the children’s trust, Leite merely sought to identify what they wanted to express and then facilitate the development of the skills they wanted to acquire—in short, the things they already wanted to do. Leite saw the children as co-authors of her project, and she allowed its scope to develop in accordance with their inclinations. As she recalls, “nothing was definite, everything was open to discussion within the context of the local culture, reality, preferences, possibilities and desires.”7
Leite’s students drew on the streets in chalk. (“No one asked what to draw. Everyone knew.”8) They built a puppet theater, for which they prepared and staged their own plays, relying on materials donated by local community members to make their puppets. Following several political discussions with Leite, the students resolved to craft stories based on their own lives. This produced several highly politicized puppet plays, which attested to the children’s sensitive mediation of the revolutionary activity happening around them. One such play, The Codfish Queue, addressed the intense food shortages in the city, while another, The Noises of Pena Ventosa, dealt with the commotion of the ongoing open-air public discussions. In their own ways, these plays thereby allowed the children to deliver an immanent critique of the adult world. As the art historian Adam Zucker notes, “the adults learned from what they saw.”9 The children also staged a soapbox race, for which they built their own cars from reclaimed materials and devised their own rules. They painted signs for political demonstrations and built and flew kites. Appliquéd to these kites were their wishes for the future.
Leite’s method, particularly her openness and receptivity to her students, bears resemblances to Jacques Rancière’s critique of traditional education. In his peculiar 1987 book The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Rancière castigates the “enforced stultification” of the “logic of explication,” by which he means the structure of epistemic enfeeblement that allows the schoolmaster to maintain power over their students.10 Staged as a subtle anarchist intervention into the polemics raging around the form that education should take in France during the François Mitterrand era, the pedagogical theory of The Ignorant Schoolmaster embarked from the example set by the eighteenth-century teacher Joseph Jacotot. Rancière considered the book less a straightforward history than an exercise in his established mode dredging up “alternative historical memory,”11 which he sought to reactivate in the present.
Jacotot was a French literature instructor working in Leuven, Belgium, who broke decisively with the “logic of explication” in 1819, when he found himself confronted with a classroom of Flemish-speaking students (he didn’t speak Flemish himself). One day, no doubt in a moment of exasperation, Jacotot simply presented his students with a dual French–Flemish edition of the canonical twenty-four-volume novel Les Aventures de Télémacque—written by the Catholic archbishop and theologian François Fénelon—and let them try to figure it out. Jacotot, the “ignorant” professor, offered no guidance save for his gesticulations of encouragement. After a few weeks of this experiment, during which Jacotot allowed his students to follow whatever translation methodologies felt most intuitive to them, his students not only spoke but also seemingly understood French perfectly adequately.
By stepping out of the way, Jacotot had—like Leite a century later—discovered that explication often not only eradicates but incapacitates and rigidifies the mind. In surrendering himself to the power of Fénelon’s dual-language Télémacque, Jacotot abandoned the “homology of delay” that Rancière critiqued—the gradualism that typifies the mode of traditional education, structured by the epistemic power differential between the explicator and the one in need of explication.12 This structure is most evidenced by students’ awareness that the answers to the rote exercises they are required to complete are simply stowed within sight in a book on the teacher’s desk. This was, and remains, a system that sustains itself through Enlightenment ideals of progress and the conviction that students should never catch up with their teachers. Instead, Jacotot chanced (in Rancière’s account) upon the forbidden truth that “everything is in everything” and there need be no fundamental intellectual disparity in a classroom. In so doing, he learned that “whoever teaches without emancipating stultifies.”13 Rancière concludes from his examination of the Belgian teacher that “the name Jacotot was the proper name of that at once desperate and laughable knowledge of the equality of reasonable beings buried under the fiction of progress.”14
From our current vantage point, fifty years later, Leite’s interventions might appear somewhat familiar, given the oversaturation of seemingly resemblant “social practice” projects in the contemporary art world and the incorporation of similar strategies into the educational departments of art institutions the world over. But there is a kernel of radicalism to Leite’s playful lessons that remains provocative. To begin with, her project was principally designed with the preservation of her students’ autonomy in mind, far from any institution or international art network. Like her peer and correspondent, the Italian maverick designer Bruno Munari, Leite adamantly pursued a “dynamic” rather than “static” pedagogy. In Munari’s words, this meant a “constantly shifting approach, suited to the needs of individuals and the present challenges they encounter.”15
At the outset of her project, during her preliminary consultations with the children of Sé, Leite asked them about their dreams, only to learn that they “did not have any, only nightmares.” At its culmination, she had emboldened the children’s imaginations and capacities to the point where their dreams were written down and attached to kites, which they had themselves built. As she later remarked: “This was the time both to dream and to live realities and situations of urgency.”16
“Ofsted” (the office for standards in education) is the non-ministerial government body for inspecting schools in England. It was introduced in 1992.
The Brazilian pedagogue Paolo Freire introduced the concept of the “banking model” in his classic critique of standard models of education, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) In his words, “in the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing,” translated by Myra Bergman Ramos, (Penguin Books, 1978, 5th edition), 45
For good recent accounts of the Portuguese Revolution, see Racquel Varela’s A People’s History of the Portuguese Revolution (Pluto Books, 2019) and Phil Mailer’s Portugal: An Impossible Revolution? (PM Press, 2012).
“Excerpts from an Interview with Elvira Leite, May 2016,” in Pedagogy of the Streets: Porto 1977 (Pierrot le Fou and Faculdade de Belas Artes da Universidade do Porto, 2019), 109.
For Francis Alÿs Children’s Games video series, see his website →. Marwan Rechmaoui’s Chasing the Sun series has manifested variously as an exhibition and an installation. See, for example, “Marwan Rechmaoui,” 18th Istanbul Biennial website, 2025 →.
Susana Lourenço Marques, “Freedom in Our Hands in Freedom” in Pedagogy of the Streets, Porto 1977, 117.
“Excerpts from an Interview with Elvira Leite, May 2016,” 111
“Excerpts from an Interview with Elvira Leite, May 2016,” 112
Adam Zucker, “Elvira Leite and the Art of Playful Pedagogy in the Streets,” Public Art Dialogue 12, no. 1 (2022): 130.
Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford University Press, 1991), 4.
Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, translator’s introduction, xxi
The phrase “homology of delay” comes from Kristin Ross’s translator’s introduction of The Ignorant Schoolmaster, p. xx.
Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 18.
Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 134.
Quoted in Jarrett Fuller, “Why Bruno Munari Taught Designers to Embrace Flexibility,” Untapped Journal (October 20, 2025) →.
Quoted in Zucker, “Elvira Leite and the Art of Playful Pedagogy in the Streets,” 127.
