In the 1970s and 1980s few listened to those asserting that, due to their investments in education, countries like Ireland, South Korea and Spain would leave Brazil behind.  In Brazil, successive governments held on to the old belief that the door to modernity was the factory and industrialization and not the school and education. 

Those countries invested in both things but emphasized education; Brazil did the same but favored industry and infrastructure.

In thirty years, the Brazilian infrastructure was superior to that of those countries; its education, shamefully inferior.  Now they have a better infrastructure but also have an educated people, capable of carrying their modernization project forward. 

Brazil lost the race to a dozen countries that were not ahead of us at the beginning of the ‘70s.  And it is losing to a country very nearby.  In ten years Mexico will have left us behind in the race towards modernity.  And it will show education indicators and, consequently, other indicators, much superior to those of Brazil.

This is the result of a national movement for education that is passed from one Mexican administration to the next, independently of which party is in power.  Mexico has treated education as a federal matter since the administrations prior to Vicente Fox’s.

The federal government, for example, pays the teachers’ salary floor.  This gives power to the national teachers union, which has but one boss.  Local governments can augment the teachers’ salaries, depending upon state or municipality finances, but federal money forms the basis of the salaries.  No administration wants to change this policy.

Inspired by the program in the Federal District of Brasília and in some other Brazilian cities, Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo adopted the Bolsa-Escola in 1997, paying a decent amount of money, around $20 per child, to poor families who sent their children to school and combining this with rigorous attendance control. 

Upon assuming office, President Fox, who was from the opposition party, kept the program intact.  He created yet another program similar to the Poupança Escola—established in the Federal District of Brasília in the 1995-98 administration—setting aside an annual deposit in a savings account if a child passed to the next grade, the money to be available for withdrawal at the time of the student’s high-school graduation.

On January 4, 2005, President Fox sanctioned a law obliging the Mexican public sector to spend a minimum of 8% of the GDP upon education, almost double the 4.5% that Brazil will spend this year.  That law received 373 votes in favor, one opposed and one abstention in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies.

It is this general disposition that places these countries ahead of Brazil.  We lack the will to make education a vector in our development and in our people’s quality of life; because of this we are falling behind.  With respect to some countries that were equal to us, this lag is now definitive.

Brazil does not lack those who defend education.  How can one explain why the country of Paulo Freire, worldwide symbol of the struggle against illiteracy, shows one of the greatest illiteracy indexes in the world?

Or why the K-12 education in the country of Brazilian educator Anísio Teixeira is facing such a shameful situation. Or why the university in the country of Darcy Ribeiro, founder of the University of Brasília, should be not be dedicated to the cause of education? 

And no one understands why a country that made such a huge electoral turn to the left could stay the course set in the 1960s, continuing the slow pace, behind the rest of the world, increasing that educational breach and, consequently, losing the race for the future.

Cristovam Buarque has a Ph.D. in economics. He is a PT senator for the Federal District and was Governor of the Federal District (1995-98) and Minister of Education (2003-04). You can visit his homepage – www.cristovam.com.br – and write to him at cristovam@senador.gov.br.

Translated from the Portuguese by Linda Jerome - LinJerome@cs.com.

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