EDUCATION-BRAZIL: Final Offensive Against Illiteracy

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Sep 24 2003 (IPS) - Brazil is taking another stab at illiteracy, after setting the ambitious goal of teaching 20 million people over 15 to read and write during President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s four-year term, which ends in 2006.

The goal of totally eradicating illiteracy is feasible today, because the conditions for success exist, said María de Jesús dos Santos, one of the coordinators of the education project of the Movimento dos Sem Terra (MST) or Landless Movement, which is pushing for more effective and broader land reform.

Besides the government decision to make its fight against illiteracy part of a broader public policy, the ”Literate Brazil” programme announced by Lula on Sep. 8 will build on the experience and understanding accumulated by a number of previous or ongoing initiatives, she told IPS.

But ”it is not enough to just teach people how to read and write,” said dos Santos, who has been leading literacy classes for adolescents and adults for the past nine years.

The newly literate adults must also be offered opportunities to continue studying, as occurs in the classes provided in the settlements of landless rural workers led by the MST, she argued.

The ”Literate Brazil” programme is the latest of a number of campaigns that have been launched in this country over the past six decades, in pursuit of the dream of universal literacy. Although many of the plans had major shortcomings, each one made progress.

In 1950, the illiteracy rate in Brazil stood at 50.6 percent, dropping gradually to 13.6 percent by 2000, according to the censuses carried out every 10 years by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics.

But in the past few years, very little progress has been made, and the illiteracy rate still stood at 12.4 percent in 2001.

Brazil has made less headway than several of its neighbours, even countries with relatively lower levels of development, like Colombia and Ecuador, which both had an illiteracy rate of 8.4 percent in 2000, and Peru, which reported a rate of 10.1 percent, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

What worries local authorities is that three percent of adolescents between the ages of 15 and 19 are illiterate, which points to the need to make the eight years of primary schooling universal, in order to eliminate the problem in the coming generation of adults.

According to official statistics, some 16 million people above the age of 15 do not know how to read and write in this country of over 174 million.

But the programme announced by Lula is aimed at reaching 20 million teenagers and adults, because it includes the functionally illiterate as well, or those who describe themselves as literate because they can write their names.

Lula, a former trade unionist and the head of the leftist Workers’ Party, says the challenge will be met by mobilising society as a whole, and by drawing schools, business, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), trade unions and other social movements into the effort. ”This is a vaccination campaign to eliminate the virus of illiteracy,” said the president.

It is unacceptable for a family headed by people with a university-level education to employ an illiterate domestic worker without teaching her to read and write, said Education Minister Cristovam Buarque.

The programme will not be directly carried out by the government, but by a range of institutions like NGOs, unions and business or professional associations, as well as city governments, through agreements with the Education Ministry, which is providing funding.

To coordinate the literacy drive, the Education Ministry set up a ”special secretariat for the eradication of illiteracy”.

The campaign will also depend on paid volunteers, who will be offered 15 reais (five dollars) a month for each student. The six- to eight-month courses will be provided to groups of between 15 and 25 people.

The MST – which occupies land that has been left to lie fallow and that fails to ”live up to the social function specified by the constitution” – wants the courses to be expanded to 10 months, and is urging the government to also provide courses in which the adult literacy students can continue studying, similar to those offered by the MST.

The success of the literacy drive will also depend on adapting the courses to the reality of rural areas, especially in the Amazon region, where people live in remote communities that are spread out over wide distances, which makes it difficult to gain access to schools, said dos Santos.

She added that it will also depend on whether the courses are accompanied by other measures, such as bringing electricity to the poorest communities, and offering transportation to the classes.

Ariovaldo José de Souza, a 44-year-old rural worker and father of four adolescents, told IPS that he ”didn’t learn a thing” in the three-month course that illiterate beneficiaries of the Zero Hunger plan – the government’s main social programme – are required to take.

Souza lives in Guaribas, the town in the northeastern state of Piauí where the Zero Hunger plan was first launched in February. The plan provides a monthly stipend of 50 reais (17 dollars) to the poorest families in the areas where it has begun to be implemented.

In Guaribas, 58.2 percent of people over 10 do not know how to read or write.

”I wanted to learn how to sign my name, but I couldn’t,” said the peasant farmer, who argued that ”only three months” is too short, especially because the classes are only offered two days a week, and not every week, but every other. ”What can you learn like that, once you’re old?” he criticised.

But the Zero Hunger plan courses do not form part of the Literate Brazil project, said Vera Mazagao, programmes coordinator at Educational Action, an NGO in the southern city of Sao Paulo.

The new campaign can make progress if it is made into a permanent policy aimed at ”increasing levels of schooling in the long-term,” and if it is integrated into other social policies that effectively improve the conditions faced by ”the most marginalised” segments of the population, she commented to IPS.

”Three months teaching people to trace letters doesn’t change a thing,” especially if the local residents continue to be plagued by hunger, she said.

Previous literacy drives may have made mistakes and suffered from shortcomings, but each campaign has been important due to ”the mobilisation, the raising of awareness, and the strengthening of demands” for access to schooling, said Mazagao.

It is important to fight illiteracy among adults, and especially adolescents and young adults, because ”you don’t educate one generation by abandoning another,” and literacy is a right of everyone that must be met in order to fight inequality and provide people with opportunities, she said.