The head of a family must take responsibility for the education of his or her children; the children will do the rest. A statesperson must take responsibility for the education of his or her people; the people will do the rest. This is so obvious that future historians will have difficulty explaining why political officeholders in Brazil never made children's education the central goal of their programs.

Historians will conclude that our leaders did not consider the children of poor people as their own children.

In 1995, when I took office as governor of the Federal District (DF), I requested that all children living in the streets of DF cities be identified. I placed their names in my personal computer; I nominated a Secretary of the Child, and we began tracking each street child, looking for families for them.

The majority had parents right in the DF; these were located and began receiving the bolsa-escola - which was the equivalent of a minimum wage - as long as they took their children back into their homes and kept them in school.

Other children had aunts and uncles, godparents, friends of their parents; with them we did the same. For those children with no one, we sought an adoptive home.

In a short time, the children returned to their homes, went back to school, and left the streets, except for those older than 16. Besides having their independence, many had been led astray by drugs, by petty crime, by the habit of living in the street. In some cases, their parents did not want to take responsibility for them.

With an eye to rehabilitating these adolescents, in 1997 we created a special house to lodge them in a shelter or semi-shelter regime. By day they attended school; at night they could not be out on the street after 10 P.M.

The house offered classes, a video-game room, refuge and meals, but it needed the authorization of the Minors' Court, since in Brazil children have the right to live in the street. A right won to guard against police mistreatment.

There is no better illustration of Brazilian evil than the fact that a child sleeping in the street is not seen as abandoned but, rather, as representing a conquest against something worse.

At a meeting in my office a judge informed me that the government could not remove the children from the street or order them to sleep in a special house.

I asked what would happen if I, the governor, should take the children to a special house under the control of the Justice of Minors and of special guardians.

He told me that I would be imprisoned. I responded that, then, he should arrest me since I had been governor for two years and there were still children living in the street.

I told him that my daughters were raised in a semi-shelter regime because I did not allow them to wander the streets at night. And that he probably did the same with his children. He replied that we have paternal power over our children, something a governor does not have over the children of others.

Child abandonment in Brazil is certainly the result of their parents' poverty, of the fragmentation of families due to a growing economic imbalance provoking migration and unemployment. It is also caused by our society's individualistic and "antifamily" culture.

But it is due, above all, to the political officeholders' irresponsible treatment of the interests of poor people, especially the interests of poor children. Until a very short time ago, after all, gentlemen in Brazil sold the children of the slaves. Now they abandon the children of the poor.

If we cannot give the officeholders paternal power over the poor's children, let us at least create the impression that the obligation of power exists so that the officeholders will take responsibility for the children whose parents do not want them or cannot care for them.

October 12 is "The Day of the Child" in Brazil.

Cristovam Buarque has a Ph.D. in economics. He is a PDT 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  -  and write to him at cristovam@senador.gov.br.

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

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