In the world we have been able to reduce poverty but not inequalities. Cities, despite being efficient vehicles to defeat poverty, unfortunately reflect in space, without mercy, all the inequalities of a given society. Public education is crucial for correcting inequalities; the assumption is that better education gives access to better jobs and better income may allow a family to achieve a better quality of life. But transferring knowledge and contents within the classroom is not even close to be the main purpose of a public school in an underserved periphery of a developing country. Before teaching how to read and write, a school is a canteen (a way to guarantee nutrition) and a shelter (access to drinkable water, sewage or protection from or rain that may not be guaranteed at home). But above everything a school is many times a fortress that is there in the first place to protect children against urban violence, drug dealing and other threats to physical integrity.
 
Elton and Léniz have been working with Caserta Foundation to use nature as a way to introduce a different notion of education into vulnerable children experience. The starting point is nature as a relief and escape from the aggressive environment that they have to bare every day of their lives. They have been exploring a redefinition of the notion of classroom so that a more direct interaction with nature can allow children to experience nature as a healing space. Basic architectural elements (roofs, walls, frames, shade, roads) are expected to create a primordial life experience in the relation between body, community and geography. It is interesting how the whole history of human settlements is reversed: cities were the safe place that protected people from a threatening nature. For too many people in the world is exactly the opposite: the city is the threat and nature may be the only way out. What Elton and Léniz are trying to do is to identify new paradigms in educational spaces so that this new notion of school can introduce, in many cases for the first time in their lives, some kind of self esteem to the children; be able to read nature, experience its beauty may be the only notion of culture that may make sense in the peripheries of the world. Some people have defined culture as what you remember after closing the book; in this case culture may be redefined as what you know before even opening one.