Young people and the Reading Circles

The Fernand Braudel Institute of World Economics has been developing its Reading Circles program, in partnership with Brazil’s public schools, to give the printed word new meaning for young people in the enrichment of learning.  

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In this pioneering program, talented adolescents are protagonists in leading small groups of fellow students in reading and discussing the classics of world literature: Homer, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Brazilian authors like Machado de Assis and Clarice Lispector.

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These Circles, directed by the psychologist Catalina Pagés, cultivate an atmosphere of confidence and mutual respect among students. Some speak more, others less, but all join in the dialogue. In these exchanges, the capacity for listening is as important as speaking. Each participant is special in his own contribution. They write letters to the Circle about their own discoveries. The texts they produce show what they have understood and achieved.

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Cooperation is a skill and method of living that must be learned. It demands attention and capacity for dialogue. Two centuries ago Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, argued that nations grow when men learn to work together, opening a path to justice and prosperity. We seek these advances in the Reading Circles.

Visions of the world

Fernand Braudel, Historian

Volume 1 da trilogia

"Civilização e Capitalismo"

Fernand Braudel  was one of the world’s most influential historians of the 20th Century. He is best known for his magnificent 1,100-page book published in 1949 entitled The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of  Philip II, a kaleidoscopic two-volume work explaining the birth of modernity.   He began writing The Mediterranean in Brazil in the 1930s while serving in a French cultural mission that helped found the University of São Paulo. He completed this great work in a German prison camp during World War II, writing from memory. 

In 1979 Braudel published the first of three volumes of Civilization and\d Capitalism: 15th-18th Century. When he died in 1985,  What was unusual about Braudel’s career as a historian was the way the detailed attention he lavished on long-term and structural trends as they appeared in daily life. In The Identity of France, Braudel depicted the transformation that France itself went through during his lifetime. It changed from an imperial nation with a majority of citizens still living as tradition-bound peasants to a people whose outlook was thoroughly urbanized, wherever they resided.