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Article Index"Art is the best education," says Luci Arena, the director of the school where the Guri centre used to operate. Music helps develop "attention, discipline and peaceful coexistence.
"A conventional class does not stimulate concentration, but music does," she says, adding that it also engages emotions, which boosts learning.
For example, one intellectually disabled student in the school "wandered in and out of the classroom whenever he wanted, as if he were in his own home." But when he started going to Guri Project classes, he understood the need to follow the rules and to listen to the teachers. Since then, he has made huge progress in his regular classes as well, says the director.
Explaining why the centre had to be moved, Arena points out that the number of students in her school rose to 1,400 this year, 300 more than last year, and that new classrooms will be needed in 2010.
Social focus
The Guri Project has social, rather than educational or employment-oriented, objectives, says the program's executive director Alessandra Costa. The aim is "to democratize access to musical culture, mainly just to open the door; producing professional musicians is not our intention," she explains.
In her view, musical education provides "tools for living" by fomenting "cognitive, sensorial and physical capabilities and skills" needed for any job or career — which is why it is described as a "sociocultural" project.
With that aim in mind, the kids are taught in groups, rather than individual classes. The objective is to bring together children of different socioeconomic levels, to foster "healthy egalitarian coexistence," which strengthens society as a whole, says Costa.
The discovery of talent is "something that happens, but it's not a goal," she adds.
Nevertheless, many of the students have their own dreams, encouraged by the creation of orchestras in the bigger centers and the performances offered on special occasions.
A large proportion of the teachers were themselves students of the Guri Project, like 27-year-old Valdir Maia, who studied in the program for five years, where he "fell in love with the cello at first hearing." He then went on to university, and now he teaches at the centre in Achiropita, a Catholic parish located in a neighborhood of São Paulo.
New regional centers
The Guri Project is now undergoing a process of administrative decentralization, which will create 13 regional centers, each of which will run a group of local centers.
The regional centers themselves will offer more advanced teaching, incorporating new instruments and forming bands, thus encouraging the formation of professional musicians.
In one of the regional centers, which could serve up to 500 students, each instrument will be taught by a specific teacher, while in the local centers, the educators teach a set of instruments, like wind or string instruments, says Idelli Costa Nichele, coordinator of the regional centre in the city of Jundiaí, 60 km from São Paulo.
This could accentuate the inequalities between the large centers and the less-equipped ones in small cities. In Cordeirópolis, a municipality of 20,000 people located 160 km from São Paulo, the local Guri Project only functions in the afternoon, which means kids who go to school in the afternoon have no chance of attending. The centre, meanwhile, has room for 129 more students - one-third of the potential student body.
(In Brazil, schoolchildren attend either the morning or the afternoon shift.)
Nevertheless, the Project benefits "the forgotten youngsters" and the poor, says Cordeirópolis Secretary of Culture Nivaldo Menezes, stressing that the centre is made possible by private donations.
Politicians, he says, don't like "culture" because it provides "slow returns."
"An actor takes years to train, while a bridge is built in a few months," he says.
Scholarships
The inevitable flourishing of talent led the administrators of the Project to create a scholarship fund to help a few gifted former students continue their studies in top-level institutions, both in Brazil and abroad.
The idea took off when 18-year-old Anna Murakawa was invited last year to continue studying violin at the National Academy of Arts in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, where she has been living since March with financial support from the Guri Project.
The next beneficiary will be Milena Salvatti, who discovered late, at the age of 17, her passion for the cello, after dreaming about dance and design. In her six months in the Guri Project, and after only three months training in cello, she revealed such great talent that she won a scholarship for music education and went on to graduate from university.
Today, at the age of 25, Salvatti, whose mother is retired on invalidity grounds, and who never knew her father because he left before she was born, has to quickly learn German to do a master's degree in Switzerland, as the guest of an orchestra in Zurich.
