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BRAZIL: Bringing Deaf Children Into the Educational System

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 11 2005 (IPS) - Brazilian engineer Eduardo Monte, 51, who has been deaf since childhood, is a consultant for small companies and is also active in several social projects in Rio de Janeiro.

Monte told IPS that his hearing problems "began at age six" and continued to worsen. Nevertheless, he was able to study at regular schools, something that he described as a "very good experience" despite the discrimination that he occasionally ran into, mainly when teachers were not trained or willing to deal with students with special needs.

But Monte’s story is a rare exception in Brazil. The latest educational census found only 344 deaf students in Brazilian universities in 2003. And the Education Ministry estimates that 80 percent of deaf children and adolescents do not attend school.

In Brazil, a country of 182 million, there were 5.75 million deaf people in 2000 – equivalent to the entire population of Denmark – according to the official population census. Of that total, 796,344 were under the age of 24.

But the 2003 educational census found a mere 56,024 deaf students in the country’s primary and secondary schools, while just 2,041 had graduated from high school.

Most parents are not aware that their hearing impaired children have the right to study, and those who attend class tend to drop out because they are unable to learn in classrooms where education is based on oral teaching in Portuguese, Marlene Oliveira Gotti, a technical adviser to the Education Ministry’s Secretariat of Special Education, told IPS.

But the government’s Inclusive Education Programme aims to change that situation, by assuming the challenge of offering "education for all". One of the goals is to incorporate 30 percent of deaf school-age children into the educational system within the next three years.

The plan includes the training of 27,000 teachers and interpreters in Brazilian Sign Language, known as LIBRAS, in training centres set up in the capitals of the country’s 27 states.

Graduate level courses in LIBRAS, which was recognised by a 2002 law as the official language of the deaf community in Brazil, will also be created.

The top priority is inclusion and mainstreaming, so that the hearing impaired can attend regular classrooms, as other disabled students already do. Currently, most deaf youngsters who attend school in Brazil do so in special educational institutions or classrooms.

But with the hearing impaired so widely spread out in such a vast country (the world’s fifth largest), it is impossible for all deaf students to have access to special schools, which would also in many cases require that they move far away from their homes, said Gotti.

Moreover, the objective is educational and social inclusion. "School represents society. Different worlds cannot be created for those who can and cannot hear," said Gotti, who explained that coexistence, familiarity and broad understanding of the potential of the hearing impaired "do away with prejudice and discrimination."

By law, no school can refuse to accept students with special needs, and all educational institutions must adapt in order to attend to those needs, said Gotti.

But the National Federation of Education and Integration of the Deaf (FENEIS) has expressed doubts about how effective the programme will be, and calls instead for the creation of more "bilingual" (Portuguese and sign language) schools that hearing impaired children would attend from early childhood.

Incorporating deaf children into regular classrooms "does not amount to inclusion" and will not change reality, said LIBRAS linguistics researcher Tanya Felipe, a FENEIS consultant.

Besides the sometimes questionable quality of teaching in Brazilian schools, "the teachers do not want these students," nor do the municipal and state governments that are responsible for providing primary and secondary education, she told IPS.

The hearing impaired are seen as "a hindrance", and they sit quietly in the back of the classroom and do not learn a thing, she said, illustrating her point by citing the case of a teacher who admitted that she did not notice that there was a deaf student in her class until the end of the year.

The government’s plan would create special support classrooms for hearing impaired students, in recognition that regular classrooms cannot really do the job, said Felipe. But instead of "support", the special classroom should provide teaching in both Portuguese and LIBRAS, she argued.

The deaf are a unique group among the disabled, because they use another language, which is visual and based on signs, has its own grammar, and thus gives rise to a different "culture", Felipe noted.

Since almost all hearing impaired children are born to hearing parents, who are unfamiliar with sign language, the children do not learn it in their homes.

For that reason the goal cannot be to teach them to read and write at the age of six or seven, before they have even learned LIBRAS or Portuguese, and when "they are only one year old in terms of their linguistic age," said Felipe.

Contact with a "community of the deaf" is needed in order for them to learn language, and to create a true learning experience, with real social interaction, she added.

Nevertheless, the Education Ministry’s programme does represent "a stride forward" by expanding education to deaf children in Brazil’s hinterland, who were merely forgotten in the past, and forcing schools to accept them as students, she acknowledged. But the problem, she added, is creating the conditions in which they are able to learn.

The government initiative is not starting from scratch. Institutions like the National Institute of Education for the Deaf (INES) have accumulated decades of experience.

INES, which now has 600 deaf students, will have the first bilingual Portuguese-LIBRAS university department, to begin functioning later this year, announced the Institute’s director, Marcelo Cavalcanti.

The government institution is already teaching LIBRAS to teachers from a number of states, in seminars promoted by local governments. But the "initial resistance to inclusion" is one of the biggest hurdles to overcome, said Cavalcanti.

Monte, the hearing impaired engineer, said the best form of teaching for a deaf student, whether in special or regular schools, "will depend on each person’s ability to communicate. Some are better at sign language, while others are ‘oral’ (they speak and read lips) or bilingual (speaking both Portuguese and LIBRAS)."

In Monte’s case, oral communication predominated, perhaps because he spoke Portuguese before losing his hearing.