Berkley Center

Background: As part of the Education and Global Social Justice Project, in summer 2013 undergraduate student Nick Dirago interviewed Fr. Javier Quirós Piñeyro, S.J., the director of Fe y Alegría Peru and former rector at the College of the Immaculate Conception in Lima. In this interview Piñeyro discusses the process of integrating students with different backgrounds in educational settings, social formation programs, and his goals for Fe y Alegría in Peru.

The Jesuits are well-known for their schools. Why is education an integral part of the Jesuit mission?

I think the Society’s work seeks the development of personal freedom. Our formative experiences as Jesuits are our spiritual exercises. Jesuit education wants to be a way of doing those exercises through education, that is, freeing the individual so that she or he can choose the best things for her or him in the service of God.

A term that gets thrown around a lot is “social justice.” What do you think social justice is?

Social justice… is seeking to ensure that everyone has the same opportunities. It’s directly related to the experience of faith, because God calls on all of us to actualize ourselves fully with others, right? So, justice is getting rid of the impediments to a person’s full self-actualization. Those impediments come to be through social structures, the way that we’ve organized ourselves…. Looking to order the world in a way that is useful for everyone. For me, that’s justice.

When in a school there are students from varied social groups—race, ethnicity, class, etc.—what role does the school have in integrating them? Should it interfere in that way, or is integration something that should happen organically?

There isn’t very much integration in Peruvian society. We’re very much a society of castes. For example, the College of the Immaculate, in economic terms, works with segment B. There’s A, B, C, D, and E. There are some from A, and a few from C. Now, I think that what distinguishes the College of the Immaculate from other similar schools is that our social reach is a little broader. There are other schools that are more focused on even smaller segments of the population. The student body of Fe y Alegría is from segment D, and even E; they’re poor.

At the College of the Immaculate, we encourage students to integrate amongst themselves—with an eye to their differences, which are sometimes more subtle. But it’s an experience of recognition and respect for the other. And indeed, we strive for the students to encounter the country and get to know its socioeconomic, cultural, and even racial diversity, for the sake of justice based on direct experience with the poor.

There is a difference between social service and social formation. In other schools, programs’ point of departure is popularizing social service. We Jesuits have always had this component, from the very beginning. But there’s a distinction between service, where you’re required to hit a certain number of hours to pass for the year, and the experience of social formation. In Peru, anyone who doesn’t know the realities of poverty is ignorant.

The College can require that you get to know these realities and facilitate an experience that is as agreeable, you might say, as possible for understanding of the reality of the poor. If later on, you want to continue being supportive, excellent. But we can’t obligate you to be supportive anymore. Because one danger that there definitely is, and I see, is…there is so much involved in coming to understand the world of the poor. If you never encounter it, you’re never going to understand. That is the experience of the students in the college: prompt them to get to know it.

There’s a program, started by a Jesuit in Chile and now all over Latin America, called A Roof for My Country. The private high schools and many elite universities here in Peru are involved. Some of our students work with the program. It builds provisional wooden housing for settlers. The volunteers concern themselves only with raising money for the house and building it. They meet the family and have some kind of interaction, and over the course of a weekend they live in the neighborhood building the houses. And the people in the neighborhoods note a significant difference between in the way our students carry themselves and the way that students from other schools do. Because our students have had other types of social experiences. And so, for instance, our students don’t have a problem eating the food that’s offered them.

These “social formation programs,” what are they? What do they do?

The idea at the core is to discover the world of another. It refers to experiences that begin when they’re very young, age four, and continue until they’re sixteen or seventeen when high school ends. They’re experiences that allow them to know that different people exist in the world, that there is poverty. Not in the sense of blaming them, that’s a serious danger.

The most beautiful experience is one that’s called “Fuera de la Jaula.” Here in Lima it isn’t mandatory, but every year more students go. The idea is that the school moves to the countryside. Students go in teams, groups of ten or twelve with a teacher, and they’re there for a week. The settlers bring them out to work on whatever it might be: if there’s a harvest, they help pick; maybe they’ll help sow the land. Students are assigned research work and they have to write a report after. The experience makes them develop links with the people. The idea is that they get to know another world, that they meet people and establish a bond of affection. You can’t love anything you don’t know.

So with regard to the student body of the college, solidarity doesn’t have to do with integrating the poor into it?

No. We’ve had some experience with that in the past, and it hasn’t worked. Because the economic differences are quite large, and it’s the poor who have experienced prejudice.

Tuition is currently 1,500 suns per month. To have your kids in the college, you need to be making at least 10,000 suns per month. A very small sector of the population makes that—maybe ten percent, or less, of the population, even though they’re still only the B sector.

There are so many expenses… What type of shoes to you have? What’s the brand on your clothes? If your family can’t pay those expenses, the other kids will be very cruel to you.

So the problem is that the students from B treat the students from D poorly?

The problem isn’t exactly that they’re treated badly. You can’t pretend, you know? In the seventies, the Jesuit schools tried this [integration], so I’m speaking from experience. The students that were integrated, or un-classed, as we used to say… in the neighborhoods they were from, [the rich] were pitucos, a derogatory term that the poor use to describe the wealthy. At school, [the poor students] felt bad. They couldn’t participate… I had students [during my regency] that spent their vacations skiing in the United States, while others were at the public pool and playing in the street. They were in the same class… but the measure was fictitious. You still had the whites on one side and the others on the other side.

And that’s something that the school can’t transcend?

I don’t think so. We can’t strive towards something so wild. It’s too wild. You have to aim for experiences that bring people closer. We feel very guilty for having schools that work with the rich—not just the Jesuits but the clergy in general. So sometimes we’ve been very radical… [but] it’s really about where you place each person. And by that I don’t mean having a mentality of castes. I mean the pragmatic thing, based on experience.

So the idea is that after having completed this process of social formation, in the future the students will be able to transcend the divide between, say, B and D?

Well, I would say the idea is that the children from sector B discover how those in sectors D and E live, that they see the structural causes behind their circumstances, and that they’re able to fight for change.

But there are limits to solidarity in that way?

Putting everyone together permanently in the classroom is harmful for the poor. It’s worse for the poor. I think we need to find other ways. The experiment that we tried didn’t work.

Could you say a little more about that experiment?

For instance, at Cristo Rey School in Tacna… 40 percent of the students were on scholarship. Very poor students. You had the best school in the city, and 40 percent on scholarship. The problem was that the school was a kind of bubble because, in society, students never came across each other. They came across each other in school. What are your goals for Fe y Alegría in Peru?

We’re fortunate that the Peruvian government pays the teachers in our schools. Fe y Alegría is in the public sector. Normally our schools perform better than the average public school. So, we’re currently working with the Catholic University of Peru on research to determine the reasons behind Fe y Alegría’s success, to find out what factors make it work better. The goal of the report is to figure out what those factors are and to be able to transmit them to public schools.

Fe y Alegría’s goals are varied. One is to educate the poor—educate them for solidarity, and there’s a big question there… All the programs that the College of the Immaculate has, I think you also have to have them in Fe y Alegría. Because there is always someone poorer than you. I worry that in Fe y Alegría, since we’re working with the poor, we’re not always working for solidarity.

So one part of it is to educate the students. And another part is to educate students’ families. But we also aim to have an impact on public education. My dream is that [the Jesuits’] four private schools, which have more resources and excellent teachers, truly be laboratories that pursue pedagogical innovation—that they’re on the cutting edge, that they’re really creating. And then use Fe y Alegría as a transmission network for all of that to the public education system. That would be my dream.

How is the relationship currently between the private schools and Fe y Alegría?

Well, Fe y Alegría here in Peru is pretty well-known for a raffle that it does. They’ve been doing it for almost 50 years now. And it’s the private schools that sell the tickets. So there’s something of a link there. On a pedagogical level, I think we could do better. But as a matter of fact we at the College of the Immaculate have a lot of contact with the nearby Fe y Alegría schools.

Could you talk a little bit about the role of Fe y Alegría schools in their surrounding communities?

The big cities in this country have expanded primarily because of the migration of poor people from the countryside. [The poor] get to the city, and the city doesn’t welcome them. So they go out to an area of state-controlled land, squat, and start building houses out of mats made from cane. Once they’ve gotten to that stage, Fe y Alegría comes in. So Fe y Alegría is with the community from the very start. Many Fe y Alegría schools actually started in buildings made of those mats. The motto goes, “Fe y Alegría begins where the asphalt ends.” Where there are marginalized people, Fe y Alegría is there.

(Continuing on the topic of goals for Fe y Alegría)

Well, like I said, one is having an impact on public education. Another is finances. The state pays 80 percent of our costs, but we have to raise the other 20. We have a lot to learn from the United States about fundraising. And that’s a kind of solidarity. You see that Fe y Alegría does good things. We want to improve education in this country. Support us. The United States supports more public service institutions with private donations than any other country. When you donate to an institution, you’re buying [into] its mission. Now, what I’m interested in is that you support me in some way. I want you to be my ally, my partner. So, it’s a kind of solidarity. You won’t be working in the school alongside me, but you’ve made the choice to buy into it.

Do you think that it’s easier to integrate poor students into the student body at the university level?

Yes, because the students are older and more mature. Everyone says that adolescents are rebels, iconoclasts, rule-breakers. That’s just not true. They are the single most normalized group, completely boxed in. Kids have norms.

I think so much of marginalization is rooted in fear of the unknown. People are afraid of it. While I was working with older students [earlier in my career], I used to talk with them about issues of discrimination and try to get them to move beyond it. But you can really only do that starting at age fifteen. Before that, the bullying is so severe, especially between the ages of nine and twelve. When they’re older they understand ideas like intimacy and friendship a bit more.

Here in Peru, the universities are democratizing instruments much more than the pre-university schools are.

Does the state have any scholarship programs here in Peru?

This year the government put in place a system called Scholarship 18. It’s quite a bit of money. Antonio Ruiz de Montoya University has some students who are on those scholarships. It’s for all of the universities in Peru.