From Drums to Diplomas: How Mangueira Is Turning a Samba School into a University
In Rio’s legendary favela of Mangueira, education and rhythm are colliding in the most radical way: the samba school that taught Brazil to dance is now teaching its people to dream differently.
Mangueira has always been more than a samba school. It’s a heartbeat, a manifesto, a moving archive of resistance. Its drums once thundered against dictatorship, racism, and poverty. Now, they’re echoing through classrooms.
In a groundbreaking move, Estação Primeira de Mangueira, one of Rio’s most iconic samba schools, has teamed up with Centro Universitário Celso Lisboa to launch a free university education hub inside the community. The project offers full scholarships for distance-learning undergraduate courses to Mangueira’s drummers, workers, and residents who have finished high school — making it one of Brazil’s boldest experiments in educação popular, or popular education.
It’s education as protest, samba-style.
The Beat of a New Beginning
The green-and-pink banners of Mangueira have always stood for something larger than Carnival glory. The community that gave Brazil legends like Cartola, Jamelão, and Alcione is now betting on the transformative power of education. The new hub — known locally as a polo universitário — will offer degree programs in business, pedagogy, psychology, and other fields. But more importantly, it will root higher education in the soil of the favela itself.
“Placing a university inside Mangueira means rewriting who gets to belong in academia,”
says Felipe Kotait Borba, CEO of Celso Lisboa. “It’s not just about access, but permanence — creating conditions for people to study, graduate, and uplift their own community.”
The idea sounds simple. But in a country where geography often determines destiny, it’s revolutionary.
University in the Favela
The average resident of Mangueira faces more obstacles to university entry than most Brazilians will ever imagine: long commutes, economic precarity, police raids, and a lingering stigma that equates the favela with failure. By situating the program inside Mangueira’s own quadra — the vast rehearsal hall where samba lines once prepared for Carnival — the initiative transforms a cultural fortress into an academic one.
The move challenges the architecture of exclusion that defines Brazilian education. It says: the university doesn’t have to be on a hill; it can rise from the valley.
And there’s symbolism in that. For decades, Mangueira’s bateria (percussion section) has been the thunderous backbone of Rio’s Carnival parades. Now, those same hands that strike drums may soon be typing essays and analyzing theories — still in rhythm, still in resistance.
Popular Education, Not Charity
This isn’t about benevolence; it’s about structural change. The program, developed under the philosophy of educação popular, draws from Brazil’s radical pedagogical tradition inspired by Paulo Freire — the idea that learning is a tool of liberation, not control.
By embedding the university within the samba school, the project bridges academic learning and cultural knowledge, refusing the colonial hierarchy that often separates “university” from “community.” It’s a decolonial blueprint for education that starts from the bottom up.
In the long run, it could reshape how other communities across Brazil — and the Global South — rethink access to learning: not as a privilege, but as a right anchored in place, culture, and identity.
From Carnival to Curriculum
The official launch is set for November 5, inside Mangueira’s iconic quadra. Between dance rehearsals and neighborhood gatherings, educators will outline how to apply for scholarships, register for courses, and get academic guidance. But the real celebration is already happening — in the faces of those who never thought university would come to them.
Because for Mangueira, this isn’t just about degrees. It’s about dignity. It’s about turning the favela’s cultural capital into academic capital — and proving that the two were never separate to begin with.
In a country where inequality often feels immovable, Mangueira is drumming out a different beat.
A rhythm that says: knowledge belongs to everyone. And it sounds just like samba.
