Last February 9, 34 students of the Dr. José Borba elementary school, in the town of Santa Maria da Vitória, Bahia, had a substitute teacher. The kids were all on their best behavior, because every minute of the lecture was being shown on TV throughout Brazil. The substitute, although an academic of great distinction, has no desire to teach at the primary level: he already has a job that pays much better than the $200 a month most teachers earn.
President Fernando Henrique Cardoso's reason for coming to Santa Maria da Vitória had little to do with enlightening a classroom full of Brazilian youth, but everything to with the marketing of politics. It was the début of "Acorda Brasil! Tá na Hora da Escola" (Wake Up, Brazil! It's Time for School), which is intended to fulfill Fernando Henrique's promise to make education "priority number 1" of his administration.
This was not the first time that Cardoso arrived in Santa Maria da Vitória to put on a TV show. He launched his presidential campaign there last year with a rally introducing the real, the new currency that much helped his winning in the first round of the elections in a field of seven candidates. When a campaign worker threw a 5-centavo piece on the platform, the then-candidate caught the coin and declared, "I'm going to keep it, because this money's worth something now."
But when President Cardoso came to substitute at Doutor José Borba, the lesson plan turned into a disaster. The students were more interested in waving at the cameras than in hearing the presidential lecture. Fernando Henrique, who was trying in vain to avoid using difficult words like "equivalency" or "motivation," chose democracy as the theme of his lesson. In an attempt to bring this abstraction to life, Cardoso compared politics to a soccer game. He, the president, is the coach, while the members of his Cabinet are the players.
According to FHC, the Brazilian people are the fans up in the grandstand, where the most they can do is to boo or cheer. Back on his University time as a teacher when Cardoso was popularizing the Dependency Theory, he would have doubtlessly thought this comparison an elitist way of seeing the problem. After the lecture, Cardoso graded himself on a curve. "I think I deserved a C-minus," he said.
If Fernando Henrique had not decided to give a lesson for the TV cameras, the regular instructor at Doutor José Borba would have been a 20-year-old student teacher, Marilene de Souza Rosa. Although, as an intern, she earns only the minimum wage, Souza Rosa considers herself lucky: her paycheck comes on time. In a neighboring public school, the teachers are three months behind on their salaries.
The main memory that Souza Rosa has of her days in elementary school, when she herself was a student at Doutor José Borba, is of the leaky roofs. "Whenever it rained, we got soaking wet and we had to leave," she told newsweekly Veja. The current crop of students at Doutor José Borba do not have that particular worry, if only because the school was remodeled for the first time in almost 30 years, in preparation for the presidential visit.
Fernando Henrique has a good reason to put education at the top of his agenda. Leaky roofs are far from a rarity in many Brazilian schools, but students and faculty at all levels often have greater troubles to deal with. According to a survey made by UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund), more than half of all Brazilian first-graders have to be held back.
In Latin America, only Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Guatemala have a greater percentage of what seems to be student failure, but which is actually a reflection of the failure of the educational system. One of the main reasons that poorer students come to school unprepared to learn is because their parents cannot give them the social, cultural and learning enrichment that children from more affluent families receive as a matter of course.
Nonsense textbooks - In Rio de Janeiro state, the Cieps (Integrated Centers of Public Education) have attempted to meet the needs of poorer children in the first four grades of elementary school. Three hundred fifty thousand students attend 406 Cieps from 8 AM to PM daily and eat three meals for free. When the Cieps first opened a decade ago, they were denounced as a publicity stunt by opponents of then-governor Leonel Brizola, who had championed the plan.
However, Marly de Abreu Costa, a professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro who is finishing a doctoral dissertation about the Cieps, says that the schools have succeeded. A survey made in 1993 by three universities showed that 93% of Ciep students did satisfactory work up to the third grade. But the reluctance of teachers to work more than the 3½ hours that Brazilian elementary schools are usually in session has been detrimental to the Cieps.
Rio de Janeiro's current state government, which has no love lost for the controversial and flamboyant Brizola, also does not care for the ex-governor's pet project. Ana Galheigo, Under-Secretary of Education for Rio state, told Rio newspaper Jornal do Brasil, "We have Cieps without students."
With few exceptions, textbooks used in Brazilian schools are inadequate not only in quantity, but also in quality. According to a recently-published study that was commissioned by the Education Ministry, many of the textbooks which the ministry itself distributes are composed of lines and lines of "pure nonsense."
For example, high school students who use the textbook Mundo Mágico will find just one mention of Tiradentes. The book states that this was the nickname of Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, but there is not one word about the life of the 18th-century revolutionary or of his importance in Brazilian history as a fighter for the country's liberation from Portugal.
Many students in public schools also cannot keep up with the latest conquests in science and technology, because many science textbooks have not been updated for at least 10 years. There are even instances of textbooks published as long ago as 1950 which are still being used in Brazilian schools, according to Lea Gaudenzi, a teacher, member of the Student Assistance Association (FAE) and coordinator of the commission of academics that wrote the Education Ministry's textbook study.
In frustration with the lack of textbooks which students would find both informative and worthwhile, some teachers have decided to resort to newspapers, comic books, lyrics from popular songs and even cookbook recipes in order to make learning more relevant to their pupils. While many teachers and parents have resisted constructivism, as this method (or rather, anti-method) is called, the results are eloquent. At the Maria Cristina Schmidt Miranda elementary school in the industrial São Paulo suburb of São Bernardo do Campo, the rate of student repeaters fell from 32% in 1991 to 10% in 1993, after the 19 teachers threw away their textbooks and followed the constructivist path.
In 1992, when students at the Maria de Lourdes de Oliveira elementary school in Belo Horizonte were failing their Portuguese tests, the faculty decided that the outdated textbooks were the problem. The teachers asked their pupils what they wanted to read and then composed a textbook just for them. The Maria de Lourdes textbook teaches Portuguese using the poems of Carlos Drummond de Andrade and lyrics by Chico Buarque, as well as the rock group Legião Urbana. In 1994, almost 70% of the students at Maria de Lourdes passed their Portuguese tests.
Abolishing entrance exam - Illiteracy continues to be a problem in Brazil: 18% of the population over 15 cannot read or write even their own names. If the criterion for illiteracy were less than four years of schooling, as educators recommend, there would be twice that percentage of Brazilian illiterates — 60 million, more than the entire population of France. On average, it takes a Brazilian student 12 years to complete the eight years of elementary school. However, the high dropout rate (some 75% of all students do not finish elementary school) makes this statistic nearly meaningless. Worst of all, approximately 5 million children between the ages of 7 to 14, whom Brazilian law states must go to school, have no access to classrooms.
Maria de Fátima de Moraes, 20, lives in Novo Airão, Amazonas, which UNICEF has revealed to have the highest rate of illiterate teens in Brazil. Of those between the ages of 15 to 17 in this town of 13,000, 81.23% cannot read or write at all. Like her the vast majority of her slightly younger contemporaries in Novo Airão, Moraes has never been to school. "When I want to send a note to some boy, I have to ask for help from a girlfriend. The problem is that then she knows my secrets," Moraes told newsweekly Isto É. Her difficulties are similar to those encountered by many young people in the North and Northeast of Brazil. According to Agop Kayayan, UNICEF representative in Brazil, "The situation is so critical that in some locations, there are more young illiterates than old ones."
While 13-year-old Júlio Omar Ferreira has gone to school, he is not much better off than Moraes. It took him four years to finish the first two grades of the elementary school in his hometown of São Sebastião do Oeste, Minas Gerais. At the end of the last school year, Ferreira was promoted to the third grade only because his teacher feared that Ferreira's father would take him out of school. But like his brothers, who dropped out of school and were put to work after completing the fourth grade, Ferreira is condemned to enlarge the army of Brazilian kids who are functionally illiterate despite some time in school. "I can make out some words, but I almost always need help to read," Ferreira says.
For those students who are able to make it to the secondary level, the main trouble has traditionally been the vestibular, the dreaded entrance exam to university. Like the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) in the US, students who can afford it go to cram courses — called cursinhos in Portuguese — in order to get as high a score as possible. But unlike the SAT, which is only one factor in college admission (others include high grades and extracurricular activities), the vestibular has been the only gateway to Brazil's colleges.
With the extinction of the vestibular, scheduled to take effect this year, that is going to change. Students and administrators do not plan on mourning its demise. "A good student can get nervous and do badly," 17-year-old high school senior Fernanda Pereira Coelho, who has the equivalent of a B average, told Rio newspaper O Globo. "Others, who never worked hard in school, go running off to a cursinho, find out what's going to be on the test, and pass. One test doesn't measure anybody's knowledge."
The vestibular may not be entirely eliminated, however. One of the proposals being considered by Education Minister Paulo Renato Souza is giving a comprehensive test at the end of all three years of high school. The average of the scores would be the college admissions offices' guide. But for the first time in Brazilian academic history, the grade point averages of students would be the main basis for university acceptance.
The best is public - "I only want to know about what can make it... I haven't got time to waste." This pragmatic assertion by the Paulista (from São Paulo) rock group Titãs seems to be the motto for some 2 million teenagers who graduate from high school each year. They are painfully aware that there are not enough spaces for them in Brazil's universities: only about 25% of them will be admitted into college, and just a bit more than half of those will get their degree. But since those who do not graduate from college will find it difficult to find fulfilling and well-paid careers, they are in search of the right college and the major that will propel them to success.
Students who want to major in medicine, dentistry, psychology, architecture, public relations and journalism (all of which are undergraduate programs in Brazilian universities) compete for a limited number of spaces. Teacher-training programs, on the other hand, go begging for prospects. The work conditions in most schools are not attractive enough to make the low salary worthwhile. If one is going to invest time and money in higher education, the profit should be worth more than a few hundred dollars a month.
Unlike the US, where many private colleges are considered more prestigious than all but a few state universities, Brazil's public institutes of higher learning are held in greater esteem. Although the tuition-free public colleges are far from being the exclusive haven of the rich (74% of all public university students come from families where there is less than $150 per person each month), it is true that students whose families would be able to afford private college tuition do their best to avoid attending a private college. Students who are less affluent or whose vestibular scores are lower often pay what they barely afford for what is too often a second-rate education at a private college.
At the private Catholic University of Pernambuco (Unicap), classified in 1992 by the Brazilian Ministry of Education as one of the 20 worst colleges in the nation, 2600 students pay an average of 200 reais a month to enroll in classes with 70 students. The normal size of a Brazilian college class is closer to 30. In some classes, five students must share one computer. The tiny college library has not bought new books for years. But what is truly shocking is that only 5% of the faculty has ever gone to graduate school. "The lack of post-graduate degrees among the professors is going to turn Unicap into a huge high school," says Sérgio Galdino, a computer science professor at the university.
The deficiencies of many private colleges cannot be attributed to lack of money. The University of Nova Iguaçu should be the wealthiest in Brazil. Besides students' tuition payments, it received $15,000,000 in federal subsidies between 1989 and 1992. The owners of the university are the family of ex-Congressman Fábio Raunhetti, one of the "dwarves" investigated by the Budget Joint Parliamentary Committee (CPI) in 1994. Despite its wealth, the University of Nova Iguaçu Medical School has labs where there are only 80 microscopes for 120 students. One immunology professor asked to resign a year ago, but the medical school still has not found a replacement.
Owning a college can be a very profitable business, as Agripino Lima has found out. He began as a farm laborer, truck driver, and door-to-door bookseller. Now, in addition to owning the 12,000-student University of West São Paulo (Unoeste), Lima has four ranches with 25,000 head of cattle and is the mayor of Presidente Prudente, the city in western São Paulo state in which Unoeste is located. Lima has no scruples in admitting that he uses the college's planes — bought tax-free — for private purposes, such as travel with his family and transporting political friends. "The college is mine," Lima told newsweekly magazine Veja. It must be. Unoeste's graphic arts department prints free of charge two daily papers and a weekly for the non-student population of Presidente Prudente. All three newspapers are favorable to the mayor.
A success story - While Brazil does not invest as much of its Gross National Product in education as the US or many other industrialized nations, Brazil's percentage is higher than South Korea or Spain. However, the World Bank estimates that of every $100 set aside by the Brazilian government for educational purposes, only $20 actually gets to the classrooms. President Cardoso has pointed a finger at "educational middlemen" who spend 30% to 50% of the total expenditures meant for education.
Despite the inequities in the Brazilian educational system, there are some success stories. Israel Luziano Dias grew up in a São Paulo tenement with parents who only knew how to write their own name. He was in and out of school until he quit after being suspended for fighting. But Dias fell in love with literature and the theater after he befriended amateur cultural groups. "It was then that I perceived that in order to do well and enjoy life, you need to study a whole lot." He went to night school, got his supletivo (General Education Diploma, or GED), and took the vestibular. Now Dias, at age 32, is a freshman history major at the University of São Paulo, the most prestigious college in Latin America. In spite of the odds against him, Dias is a winner.
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(Percentage of
Gross National Product
invested in education)Sweden 7.6
Canada 7.4
Russia 7.0
United States 5.6
England 5.2
Japan 5.1
Germany 4.6
Italy 4.0
BRAZIL 3.7
South Korea 3.6
Spain 3.2
CLASS TIME
Number of School Days per Year
Japan 243
Spain 220
Russia 208
Germany 200 to 226
Italy 200 to 210
Hong Kong 195
England 192
Canada 186
United States 180
BRAZIL 180
SOME NUMBERS
The federal government
spends each year:$5 billion in universities
$2.75 billion in basic education
$550 million in technical education and high school
The country has:
304,000 public schools
40,000 private schools
241 public universities
652 private universities
42 million elementary and secondary students
1.6 million university students
2 million teachers (elementary, secondary and university levels)
5 million children between ages 7 to 14 who are not in school
Report Card
· Brazil approaches the year 2000 with 30 million "declared" illiterates, 20 million of them over age 10.
· Industrialized nations have a work force with an average of 11 years of schooling. In Brazil, that average is less than four years
· In a comparison made by the International Institute for Management Development of Lausanne, Switzerland, about the qualification of the work force in 41 different countries, Brazil was in 37th place. The quality of public education and the amount of learning in high school entered in the evaluation
· If the trends of the past decade continue, Brazil should attain a 90% high school graduation rate in the year 3080, according to the CNPq (National Counsel of Scientific and Technological Development.
· According to UNESCO, 95% of Brazil's students have access to elementary education, but only 18% finish the fourth grade
· Only 12% of the economically active population of Brazil are being prepared for a modern technological society (FAO)
· Just two in every 100 Brazilians in the seventh grade understand more than 70% of the contents of their math classes
· Brazil came in last place in a survey made by UNICEF about the 10 worst countries where the percentage of children who get to the fifth grade is significantly worse than expected, considering the Gross National Product. The next-to-last is Gabon, preceded by Haiti. On the list of the 10 best, China appeared in first place
· The monthly salary of Brazilian elementary and secondary teachers is, at best, $300 a month
