The Bolsa program offers support for poor families in exchange for sending their children to school. It has been widely acclaimed at being one of the best tools to reduce poverty and enhance literacy at the same time.
I am by no means an expert on development aid programs and educational policies. However, what struck me is how the usefulness of programs like Bolsa seems to end as soon as they hit what the Economist termed “modern poverty” – domestic violence, drugs, gangs) as opposed to the traditional poverty, hunger and unemployment.
The reason to me seems to lie in the externalisation of discipline. The way the European countries developed was through a painful process in which they instilled discipline into most of their members. From the introduction of standing armies, the enforcement of punctuality at workplaces, the austerity and much-ridiculed exactness and rigity of their civil servants, all of these were different provisions to turn each and every member of their societies into a person that would maintain the schedules and routines that a modern industrial society needed – even if left to himself. Michel Foucault has been invaluable in describing this process, as have other french Philosophers such as Bourdieu and Virillo, probably cause their is a country that first started this “formation” of citizens.
It might just be a reactionary impulse, but I wonder whether it is possible to build a modern society without this internal clockwork, just based on incentives. I also do realize how fishy and self-righteous it may sound, advising peoples in a favela to “just develop some discipline”. That`s not really the point I am trying to make, and that`s not what I am saying. I just wonder whether this process, can be circumvented by replacing discipline by incentives.
I am not sure if this point is indeed a reactionary argument only, and if these “secondary virtues” – that, as someone so rightly pointed out, can also be used to run a concentration camp, are necessary, and if so, whether they can be created without all the hassle and pain the west went through. “No pain, no gain”, yes, the old yada yada.
I shall need to think about that some more.