EDUCATION-BRAZIL: In Search of Quality and Equity

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 5 2000 (IPS) - Quality and equity are the big challenges for Brazil’s education system today, now that enrollment has expanded to 96 percent of children aged 7 to 14, up from 89 percent in 1994, said education minister Paulo Renato Souza.

In Latin America’s giant, where schooling is compulsory through the eighth grade, an additional 4.5 million children have been incorporated into the education system since 1994, the minister told foreign correspondents here.

In secondary education, enrollment has risen 57.3 percent, from 4.9 to 7.8 million students, or 32.6 percent of 15 to 17-year- olds. University enrollment, meanwhile, rose 28 percent from 1994 to 1998, to 2.1 million.

The priority so far has been put on the first eight years of school, which Souza described as the bottleneck of an inefficient system. Only slightly more than half of all students actually finished eighth grade from 1994 to 1998, and they did so in an average of 12 years, instead of eight.

High rates of failure lead, in turn, to high repetition and dropout rates. But today, said the minister, students’ performance has improved, and the average time youngsters spend completing the basic eight-grade course has been reduced to 10 years.

Basic education is decentralised, and comes under the jurisdiction of state and municipal governments. The central government, however, has used the mechanisms over which it has control, especially financial aspects, to bolster enrollment and performance.

A new “fund for development of basic education and valuation of the teaching profession” has helped boost teachers’ salaries, while state and municipal governments have expanded their education budgets.

“Teachers who earned 20 dollars a month now earn 10 times that” in parts of the impoverished northeast, said the minister.

The improvements have translated into a boom in middle-school enrollment, and are beginning to have the same effect at the university level, he explained.

But secondary school has become the new bottleneck, with an overly abstract curriculum that puts too much emphasis on theory, thus failing to adequately prepare students for the workplace or even university. Overhauling the high school curriculum has become the new priority, said Souza.

Secondary school remains virtually the exclusive realm of the children of the middle-class and the wealthy, a legacy of the elitism that has traditionally dominated education in Brazil. The quality of primary education must improve if the poor are to be given the opportunity to make it to high school and college.

The reforms undertaken by the ministry of education have been primarily based on changes in the subject matter taught at primary and middle school, with a new curriculum aimed at putting education in context and bringing it into closer contact with local realities, through an interdisciplinary approach.

In the past, secondary education was geared to preparing students for university entrance exams. But the new focus, Souza told reporters last Friday, is on “lifelong education” and “opening new horizons” for students, providing them with a basis for going on to other areas, not only the university.

A TV network providing support for teachers, which already reaches 60,000 schools with more than 100 students each, higher quality textbooks distributed on time to all schools through eighth grade, and a recently initiated process of computerising schools are other initiatives with which the education ministry is seeking to boost the quality of teaching.

The process of computerising schools has begun with the training of 20,000 teachers and the creation of 220 recreational centres, previous to the widespread installation of computers.

Souza said the ministry studied the experiences of developed countries, and found that efforts to incorporate computers into the school curriculum had sometimes fallen flat due to the failure to previously train teachers.

One major problem which secondary and higher education has yet to overcome is the exclusion of the poor. But the minister said he did not believe “affirmative action” initiatives in which spots at university would be reserved for Black students were effective.

In Brazil, it would even be difficult to identify just who would benefit from such quotas, given the fact that such a large percentage of the population is “brown” or mixed-race, rather than identifiably “Black”, “White” or “Indian”.

Moreover, it is the poor in general, and not only Blacks, who lack access to a higher education, said Souza, an economist and former university rector who has been involved in the field of education since 1984.

The minister said a better approach was to offer more favourable conditions allowing Blacks better access to university. As an example, he cited courses that the University of Sao Paulo offers to help Black students overcome their disadvantages with respect to students whose families could afford to send them to private high schools.

Souza is also attempting to modify university admissions, previously based exclusively on entrance exams. Souza is working to establish tests in high school that assess capacity to learn rather than information accumulated.

Secondary and tertiary education are still the domain of the elite, thus “reproducing the social inequalities” that characterise Brazil, the minister acknowledged.