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 Brazil will be the country that we want only on the day that, when a baby is born, his or her father, holding his child into his arms, will say, “When my child grows up, he (or she) will be a teacher.”
And it will not be the country that we want as long as people find this sentence funny, as if it were a joke, or, even worse, as if taking up this profession did not deserve to be a father's wish for his child.
But what is not funny is the fact that Brazil will not have a future as long as we think this way.
We should change the “teacher” job title to that of “bricklayer” of Brazil, engineer of the future. When we limit the profession to education, we disvalue the real dimension of its role.
We link teachers to the world of letters, of numbers, of ideas, without perceiving that behind this subjectivity is the goal of constructing a country. Or not.
Engineers and artisans construct things of stone, but the teachers make the artisans, the engineers, and each and every one of those who are constructing Brazil through their occupations and through the citizenship deriving from their education.
Even so, people laugh at the idea of the father who dreams of his child becoming a teacher.
Brazil does not treat its teachers like the constructors of its future. No profession requiring the same amount of education pays such low salaries or is so little valued and respected.
The day of paying homage to 2.5 million K-12 teachers (October 15 is the Brazilian Day of the Teacher) is treated like a school holiday to which they have a right and nothing more.
First, because Brazil shows a preference for the material over the cultural product.
The name “brasileiro” [Brazilian] means “the one making Brazil wood,” as opposed to the suffixes used for the other nationalities, which end in “ês” or “ino.”
And the name is “professor,” not “ensineiro” [instructor], as in pedreiro [bricklayer] or engenheiro [engineer].
Second, because of the elite's historic disdain for the lower classes: when public education was only for the few, i.e., the children of the elites, the teacher was valued; when the enrollment spread to the lower classes, the teacher was abandoned.
Third, after going into so much debt to build the industrial, energy, and transportation sectors, the various administrations said it was impossible to recognize the importance of their teachers by paying them dignified salaries.
And lastly, after decades of disdain, the teachers appear to have given up, lost their enthusiasm, and to some extent abandoned their dedication, justifying in turn the low salaries and the lack of recognition.
All this could change, as was attempted at the beginning of the Lula government by implementing a program of Federal Certification of the teacher.
The teacher would no longer be merely the concern of the city and state and become the concern of the federal government.
A national salary floor would be instituted, paid with federal funds, along with a national knowledge floor, evaluated by a federal competitive exam.
But Brazil has manifested such little sensitivity to the matter that the first questions raised were “How much will it cost?” and “Where will the money come from?”
These questions never come up concerning other goals. What is most surprising is that the cost would be low, many times less than the cost of doing nothing.
Therefore, to accomplish these changes, it would be necessary that the future political officeholders—the children who have just been born—would have already been born into the future that we desire.
To construct the future of an educated population it would be necessary for the present population to already be educated. One dilemma that Brazil is not succeeding in resolving.
Perhaps the solution would be to replace the Day of the Teacher, in the country that does not value its teachers, with the Day of Construction of the Future Brazil, thus revealing that it is the teacher who makes the nation.
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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