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Dear friends and colleagues, this is a letter to people who inspired me since I entered the world of Science Education Museums as I visited the Exploratorium in San Francisco in 1982. They accompanied me as I created Espaço Ciência Viva (A Space for Living Science) in Rio de Janeiro. It was at their side that I lived Science Education for the People at the Exploratorium Teacher Institute during the 90's. As I helped others create new museums and Science Centers around the world I always turned to these teacher-colleagues and teaching artists to illuminate my recommendations. Dear Sally, dear all, It was wonderful to hear your voices over the phone lines last May. You may remember how enthusiastic I was about a huge museum project in one of São Paulo's suburb city, Santo André. Santo André is the "A" of the "ABC" industrial workers' belt of municipalities that became famous in the 70's as rank and file trade unions got organized during the strong-armed military government; that is when Lula rose as a union leader. He is from the "B" city, São Bernardo, next to Santo André. That was in May of last year, and that year was an electoral year in Brazil too... I had been asked to consult for the project. The Secretary of Education of Santo André and her vice had come to recruit me at home. In spite of my tearing apart the idea of building a Foucault pendulum exactly under the tropic... of calling the plan for buying an IMax movie theatre "pedagogical prostitution" (their argument was that the financial survival of a Science Education Museum depended on having such a tourist attraction that could charge high prices, that Science Museums do not support themselves from what they "sell". They had touristed through the biggest museums in Europe and their approach seemed budget oriented)... they hired me. Nothing written down, fees agreed upon, air tickets guaranteed, a few days in Santo André every three weeks: a typical brazilian arrangement. And then, there was the promise that there was half a million dollars ready for spending on exhibits, and I knew where to get the exhibits from: you all! After all we had done some work together before. I had been responsible for selecting Exploratorium exhibits for the Lisbon Living Science Museum. Contracts had been signed and executed then and today it is the most admired part of the permanent collection there. But this time around, I am sorry - not that I called you up and had wonderful dream conversations in which the real stuff that each of you builds and sells could be integrated into an Exploratorium Teacher Institute pedagogy adapted to the urban brazilian situation. I thought that I could guarantee the appropriation of your realizations by teachers first (the Secretariat of Education IS responsible for the project). I am sorry for having asked so strongly and so urgently for your cooperation (remember, it all had to be ready before september... to be inaugurated before the october elections, hopefully for the re-election of the mayor of Santo André, a Lula's party, PT man, as did happen). All of you responded with that mix of friendship and professionalism, of affection and realism, that characterized the original Exploratorium. I am sorry that I led you to trust me for a cause that turned out to be untrustworthy. I have been naive beyond reason, my usual poetic self. But, allow me to put this adventure into context. During this 2004 electoral year, millions of Brazilians turned out to be just as naive as I have been. They could not imagine that the Workers Party's promises to work for the common people's well-being would be substituted by policies that enrich bankers and managers of the global commercial economy. To help win the election Lula needed money. He had learned that the amount of money available to a candidate determines wins in the USA. So the standard corruption schemes that usually favor individuals in high places were put in place to amass money, create parallel accounting, announce multi million projects (like the biggest Science Museum in Latin America...) and use the money for political propaganda of the party as a whole. The half million dollars worth of exhibits I had to invest in your pieces went for standard electoral propaganda. They even made outdoors to announce the said big museum... It was more direct and effective to build a media image than to put together a true museum and show real exhibits. So they used the money their political way, not my educational way. But they also did not tell me. The huge building cost 7 million dollars, officially; it was not ready at election time and is almost finished, and empty, as of today. And there is still no money for exhibits. And there is no money for pedagogical content advising: I have not been called upon since the re-election of Lula's candidate, the desired victory for the continuity of political power in Santo André. It all seems a little strange and incomprehensible, doesn't it? So let me go into a little background that I slowly unearthed and that I did not know about when I dragged you all into this adventure. Two years ago the then mayor of Santo André, Celso Daniel, was assassinated after being abducted from his car at an electronic speed control point within town. He was to be the leader of Lula's campaign for President. Money was flowing in and out of the coffers of Santo André and of the Workers Party... Building contracts scandals involving the Secretariat of Public Works were appearing in the media... During his almost eight years as mayor, Celso Daniel had turned Santo André into the greenest urban area possible in São Paulo's context. His Park and Gardens director took off all walls that enclosed municipal buildings, each separately from its neighbor. He substituted them with wire fences where necessary, so that kids would not run from a kindergarten yard into a basketball court, or a football roll away into a municipal Health Clinic's window. He planted thousands of palm trees and more of native plants; he redesigned sidewalks and squares with simple benches and tables; he created a park open 24 hours, there where the media talked about street kids violence. So Celso Daniel had a few people around him who did work at the service of the population. But the direction of Parks and Gardens was changed a year after his death. Coming back from a trip to Europe where he visited interactive museums Celso Daniel proposed building his Santo André Science Museum at a cabinet meeting weeks before his assassination. Somehow the architect, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, a celebrity in São Paulo, was contracted and designed a rectangular $6 million building. He and I only met once, on the "announcement day" for the Museum in July 2004. That was a day of propaganda for the city when the building designer sat on one side of the mayor and the pedagogical designer (yours truly) sat on the other side. My words went into thin air that day and therafter, and they never found their way into written proposals, or, as I wrote one myself (asking for money from the Federal Program for Science Popularization) to prepare an initial group of core teachers, never left the fourth floor of the municipal building... The architect and I had the following exchange as we visited together the building site and the mayor laid a memorial stone. I asked: "Could you make some opening at one end of the 600 feet long building, there where the teachers classrooms will be, so that workshops can make easy use of the park that surrounds the museum?" - "It's good for teachers to walk through the museum to the central entrance. In any case I design buildings; that is what I do. I never visited a Science Museum in Europe. I am offering this building and you do what you can inside it." But then he added: "If after you've lived in it for several months you and your teachers want to open up the far wall, then do it yourselves." This, to me, is a typical example of the arbitrariness of Brazilian arbitrariness... I do not claim that I understand what went on. But I think that you should know about some of the realities of neoliberal Brazil and its individual technocrats, all affiliated (even if recently for quite a few) to the governing Workers Party of Lula. There is an international congress of Science Museums coming up this May in Rio de Janeiro. The big guns will be showing off. They all spent millions of dollars on buildings. Look for help for teachers... not pictures or declarations, the real thing, as we know it at the Teachers Institute. You'll find out that the museums charge for field trips and nothing more goes on on any regular basis. They all talk of being third or fourth generation museums; it makes us all feel old, doesn't it? And it makes the plea of our colleague Ward Fleming to organize some form of systematic testing of his new plastic pins pinscreen with groups of students and teachers sound like baby talk or an artisan's concern from a pre-capitalist era. One museum is showing off a lot these days, the one in Porto Alegre, situated at the Catholic University, owned by the catholic Marista congregation, built with approximately $10 million from the Federal Science and Tech Ministry's public funds and another $10 million from the private VITAE foundation based in São Paulo. It is the largest in South America, on three floors with a high cupola from which hangs a Foucault pendulum (it appears to turn satisfactorily today although it went the wrong way during many months after the inauguration...). It charged everyone as soon as it opened, one and a half times the price of a movie ticket. Today you pay an extra fee to enter a small inflated planetarium that occupies the space of a discontinued program of exposition of school projects that were organized by a field trip staff. The director proudly publishes the daily income generated by the coins that people must throw into the "Gravitational Potential Well" exhibit to see the effect... The "explainers" are students of the University placed in the area of their "specialty" in the museum, biology students in the biology area; they are paid $140 per month for a 28 hour week; they have no training meetings. In an obscured region dedicated to optical phenomena I found myself confronted with an optical bench of the freshman lab type and a title: "Equation of conjugate points". A teacher who was attending the World Forum on Education held in the University's Convention Center, constructed at the same time as the Museum, was looking on at the white screen at one end; she abandoned the place before I could find the lens left smack against the light source. This "exhibit" is part of a group ordered by the Director from a Physics professor who worked out the topics from a textbook... I do focus on this museum because of its privileged relationship with the Vitae Foundation. Vitae will close this year and called upon brazilian science museums, that it selected, to enter proposals for its last distribution of funds, big funds. The Santo André museum project is among them. One person from each of these museums just spent two weeks at the Porto Alegre Museum of Science and Technology attending a course given by the Director and his wife (the pedagogical director of the museum whose six feet high translucid plastic volcanoe model spitting out mist fumes among neon tubes lava flows leaves visiting first graders in awe) on how to run a modern science museum... Of course there are some wonderful things at this place, like the films about childbirth and dismountable plastic bodies and organs. But the "Soap Wall" is against a white wall, without special illumination and its graphics ask you to blow on it to test its elasticity... So who does what? for whom? when? for what? I am afraid that money is the only answer to all these questions. Money is talking loud in Brazil for those who are friends of those who have the power to distribute some. So I discovered that the floor plan that local architects and I imagined to set up exhibits in the huge Santo André Museum building was recently shown to Jorge Wagensberg as he was on a visit to São Paulo. He is the director of the Barcelona museum who created a corner of Amazonian forest in his place and knows what real money is: his museum is sponsored by La Caja, the national savings bank of Spain. Wagensberg loves Brazil and every Brazilian museum director sees him as guru. Every meeting wants him as the star. There is an interesting detail to add in the present situation: he is a consultant for the Vitae foundation... Retrospectively I am glad that all that you each had agreed to prepare for this museum did not come through as no-one ever looked at a contract proposal. It would have put your works within a corrupted world. General de Gaulle said that "Brazil is not a serious country"; today it is worse, it is a seriously corrupted country, at the government level and at the educational level. You can confer the virtual reality of all this (what they say about it...) at http://www2.epac.santoandre.sp.gov.br/ As for me, I'll keep working with and for indigenous peoples as they affirm and organize around their own cultures, their own languages and, also, their own original mathematical thinking. I hug you all from the summer time of Florianópolis. I'll be up in the States during February and at the Exploratorium at the end of the month for the ethnomathematics gathering with Northern California teachers. Maurice Maurice Bazin Rua Pau de Canela 1001 Campeche/Florianópolis 88063-505 Brasil Tel: 55 48 237 3140