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Education of the Sertões; Tom Zé; oral culture; feeling/thinking; analfatóteles.
This research discusses education within the universe of the Brazilian sertões. Its aim is to understand the theoretical and social formulations of oral education in the vidartistic journey of Tom Zé. This singer and composer from the sertão of Irará-BA, raised within an oral culture, affirms collective voices and territories, whose sabenças (embodied wisdom) rise beyond the legitimization of Cartesian knowledge, which significantly contributes to the standardization of subjects. The work is traversed and guided by what the writer Conceição Evaristo (2020) calls escrevivência, and is therefore written in the first person. I employ the theoretical-methodological approach of the Research Group Sertania e Educação (UFRN), grounded in its fluid pillars or "mobile foundations": vastness, anthropophagy, itinerancy, and personhood. In contemplating Science and Education where the sertões are possible, the contributions of Barbosa Junior (2017, 2023), Ferreira (2010), Senna (2003), Piúba (2022, 2023), and Rezende (2024) were essential, as were the decolonial perspectives of Quijano (2005), Marcelo Lemos (2019), Walter Mignolo (2007), Lélia Gonzalez (2020), and the Afro-Indigenous insights of Krenak (2019, 2020, 2022) and Nêgo Bispo (2022, 2023), the latter with a counter-colonial perspective. The study revealed that the Education of the Sertões is an education of the senses, not merely oral, as it evokes and mobilizes worldviews and forms of learning that engage the being in its entirety. The flow of oral education from the sertão of Irará affirmed Tom Zé as a pessoa acesa (an enlightened being), present both in and with the world, reinventing himself daily and resisting the fierce attempts to standardize individuals— a process that characterizes him as a counter-colonial educator.