After declaring Brazil's Independence, the Empire's leaders decided to educate the children of the small, free aristocracy, excluding the slaves. The number of quality public schools increased with the establishment of the Brazilian Republic, but the masses continued to lack access to education.

When development and urbanization brought pressure for educating the multitudes in the urban centers, the astute leaders opened municipal public schools with neither resources nor quality. At the same time they transferred their own children to quality private schools, taking care to finance them in part with federal money by means of a tax exemption.

Today, the top of the social pyramid spends 58 billion reais (US$ 26.5 billion) on the private education of their seven million children and in turn receives 1.1 billion reais (US$ .5 billion) as Income Tax restitution.

At the same time, the 48 million K-12 students in public school receive 34 billion reais (US$ 15.5 billion), of which merely 4 billion reais (US$ 1.8 billion) comes from federal resources.

Thanks to the republican aristocracy's astuteness, the federal government spends 250 reais (US$ 114.20) annually per student at the top of the social pyramid, and 92 reais (US$ 42.03) per student at its base.

The leaders abandoned K-12 education to the municipalities and the states, but maintained the federal financing for the universities. The astute at the top invented a mechanism for selecting the best among their children, thanks to the quality K-12 education that they receive, to restrict the access to free, quality higher education.

This is something like an astute exclusionary quota for the children of the poor. Having received an extremely low-quality K-12 education, paid by the municipalities, the children at the base of the pyramid abandon high school, or do not take the Vestibular college entrance exam in conditions equal to those of the children at the top, who receive a good education.

And the federal government pays almost 10 thousand reais (US$ 4.6 thousand) annually for each child of the top of the pyramid who is a student in a federal university. Our republican democracy does not threaten the privileges of the aristocracy.

When it perceived the increasing demand for access to higher education, the top of the pyramid once again demonstrated its astuteness: Instead of increasing the number of state-university spaces, it liberated the creation of private institutions, maintaining the free, quality federal universities for its own children.

The youth below the top of the pyramid see new horizons but are enrolled in low-quality college courses at the cost of immense family sacrifices, sometimes to the point of financial bankruptcy.

When this bankruptcy begins to generate dissatisfaction, those at the top astutely decide to offer tax exemptions to the private universities offering scholarships.

They take 57 million reais (US$ 26 million) more from the federal government for the University for All Program (ProUni) to partially finance the cost of 112 thousand spaces in private institutions without increasing the expenditures for the 48 million students in K-12 education.

But all astuteness comes at a price. Brazil perceives the high cost of abandoning K-12 education. Yet, instead of trading astuteness for the solution, those at the top present the Fund for the Maintenance and Development of Basic Education (Fundeb) - an additional federal-government investment of 1.9 billion reais (US$ .87 billion) for K-12 education in 2006, which is intended to reach 4.3 billion reais (US$ 2 billion) in four years - and announces it as a great deed.

The astuteness of the Workers Party (PT) government's Fundeb is differentiated from the astuteness of the previous Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) government's Fund for the Maintenance and Development of Fundamental Education and Valorization of the Teaching Profession (Fundef) by a miserable  37 reais (US$ 16.90) more per student per year. But it does not promote direct federal-government action in the K-12 education of all the children.

The worst of the astuteness is that it binds those at the top to their egotism and fools the base in their illusion. It even binds those who succeed in identifying this astuteness but end up defending it as being a lesser evil. Because the astuteness that fools appears better than the promises that never seem to be kept.

Meanwhile, it would not be difficult to trade this astuteness for an investment allied to a Law of Educational Responsibility that would, in a few years, permit all children to be guaranteed schools that are well equipped, with full-day schedules, well-trained and well-paid teachers, responsible administrators, and a top of the pyramid with patriotism and intelligence, instead of stupid republican astuteness.

The price of the astuteness is much greater than the cost of the solution.

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 – 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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