Lexi's+Paper

Favelas (slums) in Brazil. http://webhome.idirect.com/~powerpix/Resources/images/picture%20stories/Brazil/favella.JPG[|)]

=Education in Brazil: A Case Study=

Lexi Nisita

Brazil is one of the most diverse countries on earth. In no other place does the term “melting pot” fit so aptly. The many cultural diversities have brought Brazil its vibrant culture of today—along with a social strata that excludes millions of people in poverty-ridden slums comparable to those in the poorest of developing nations. It is a vibrancy tainted by unofficial racial segregation. These slums smolder next to rich, Westernized city centers where education is a high social priority that contrast starkly with the desperate, highly illiterate populations of city slums and country villages. The families that live in these slums have lived there for generations with no way out. Education, seen in wealthier, modern areas as a clear route to success, is forgotten in these dwellings in favor of more accessible and immediately profitable lines of work—namely, drug dealing and petty crime. Years of racism, the not-so-ancient marks of enslaved peoples, and a history of a corrupted government that has long trodden on the backs of the poor has left Brazil’s struggling masses without any other option. Since its discovery in 1500 by Pedro Alvares Cabral, people from vastly different nations and regions have flocked to Brazil for its economic promise in mining and textiles and (for a time) sugar, its open territory, and the novel opportunities in political and social mobility. Like most of Latin America, Brazilian demographics show heavy influence from the Iberian Peninsula (Burns 541). However, slaves came in huge numbers from Africa beginning as early as 1538. France established a colony in 1555 and, while much of it died out, a native population, though enslaved and oppressed, survived and mixed, particularly in recent years (Burns 543). Dutch conquest reached the northeastern parts of Brazil. As is the case with much of the Americas, Brazil experienced a large influx of European peasantry and middle class immigrants seeking political power and social mobility in a wide-open system. However, in keeping with its Latin American neighbors, Brazil experienced years of political turmoil and revolution as it strove to define itself, including but not limited to the struggle for independence, won in 1822 (Burns 153). Once Brazilian politics did solidify to an extent in 1890, the church and the state were separated—a gesture of great significance because of the Portuguese contribution of devout Catholicism. While this arguably brought Brazilian education up to general Western standards of quality, it was years in the making—that is to say, Brazilian education endured and still endures many setbacks in its educational system. The first one occurred when the Marques de Pombal (ruled from 1750-1777 through José 1, during the Portuguese Enlightenment) banished a missionary Jesuit group called the Black Robes for an attempt on the king’s life in 1759 (Burns 107). Unfortunately, like many Jesuit groups did during colonial times, the Black Robes had controlled most of the education in the country, and their absence led to a dip in colonial education for some years. Their attitude had been one of tradition and scholarship, while José I introduced new ideas of experimentation and scientific thought (Lima 160). While this period undoubtedly brought progress in the quality and content of Brazilian education, it left the poor and enslaved peoples of Brazil in the dust. José I’s enlightenment education was a philosophical and conceptual one with very little application in the everyday lives of those below the elite. It also required extensive years of study, as was neither practical nor feasible for impoverished peoples. What was more, the main application of Enlightenment education fell into elite gatherings of well-learned men and sometimes women. These groups consisted mainly of the “local intellectuals” (Burns 122), which, not surprisingly, were best defined as “all the educated elite, the teachers, doctors, lawyers, bureaucrats, some military officers, merchants, and priests” (Burns 123). The few military officers were the farthest that education ever trickled down during this period and for many years afterwards, until the early 20th century. Enlightenment education, a pattern that maintained influence for decades, demonstrated a characteristic theme of the colonial period—political arrogance and elitism denying rights to the poor or enslaved masses, particularly education.

DATA: School age population. Pre-primary. Total (Taken from UNESCO)

By the early 1800s, Brazil was in dire need of opportunities in higher education. Beginning in 1808, a number of reforms led to the opening of a Naval Academy, a medical school, and a 60,000-volume library in Rio de Janeiro (note: the schools offered a wide variety of courses, from engineering to drawing and agriculture). However, E. Bradford Burns points out in his “History of Brazil” that, not surprisingly, education was still reserved for an elite slice of the population. In Rio de Janeiro, one of the most affluent areas in Brazil, only 12,000 students attended primary school in 1879 and there was only one public secondary school. Naturally, conditions in rural provinces were much, much worse—one region called Mato Groso had only about 1,300 students attending primary school and there was no opportunity for secondary school at all (Burns 148). In the early 20th century, under Getulio Vargas, education was reached out to the middle classes through the Ministry of Education (Burns 416). Getulio’s Ministry of Education was the first instance of a truly organized, government-implemented education system. Nevertheless, it still escaped the needy hands of the poor—a majority of the population. Even during independence, which coincided with Enlightenment, Portugal kept a strong cultural and political hand in Brazil. When Brazil did gain its independence in 1821, José I left his son Pedro in control of the country (Burns 152). After independence, the principles of the Enlightenment period led Brazilian education to a more recognizable form of secular education. The setbacks that ensued can be largely attributed to the colonial legacy left by the Portuguese. As a European country, Portugal wanted its colonies to shine an affectionate and positive light onto the motherland. While they moved away from classic works, Pedro and many of his successors, not to mention the intellectuals who thrived beneath them, began a still-existing emphasis on education in foreign languages and contemporary European texts, such as Cartesian philosophies and mathematics (Burns 120). Today, many of these same problems still haunt the education system in Brazil. There is no quality standard for education across the board, and it is highest in the city centers of wealthy states. Even with funding, in 1965 the dropout rate in Brazil was higher than that of both Liberia and the Philippines (McCoy 40). For those who do stay in school, most go through about 12 years of co-educational public schooling. As McCoy reports, elementary school is free and mandatory for three of the five years, although the Ministry of Education is currently pushing to extend mandatory schooling to all five years of elementary school. In these five years students learn fundamental courses, such as reading and arithmetic. Secondary school is split into two parts, first four years, which includes continued general education with an optional minor focus in technical training and then three years of specialized scientific or classical training. After all of this, the average Brazilian student has taken a whopping seven years of Portuguese, seven of French, six of English, seven of Latin, biology, chemistry, physics, world history, world geography, geometry, trig, calculus, and philosophy. Despite that, estimates are these students are about equivalent to a Middle School graduate in the United States (39-43). There are also about 830,000 (a very small number compared to the whole population) adults and adolescents attending post-secondary schools, not universities, aimed at improving literacy or providing a technical education. The ever-yawning gap between the rich and the poor carries the same burdens for the latter that it would in any society: a lack of healthcare, a high birth and mortality rate, and a climbing drug traffic and crime problem. This gap between rich and poor, however true, is probably better described as a gap between black and white. In rural areas and particularly in city slums, the dropout rate in 1965 was measured to be higher than that of the Philippines or Liberia. Additionally, 20% of Brazil’s total population is illiterate, as is more than 50% of Brazil’s black population. Government funding is imbalanced and biased—in 1965, the affluent Sao Paolo state had an education budget equal to that of all the other states combined. In the northeast, only 30% of adults are literate. In the city slums, where the most devastated conditions are found, a majority of inhabitants are black (Buckley 1). As it has long governed the demographics of the poor, race is still a noticeable factor in any statistic on Brazilian education. This is the destination of a long trail of prejudice from the Brazilian government. Brazil was the last country to end slavery in 1888. For many years, the government viewed the varied spectrum of races in Brazil as a defect, and tried to homogenize the population by luring in white European immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th century. This tainted history has, not surprisingly, left Black Brazilians in extreme poverty. Studies show that in Brazil, only 2% of Black students continue with higher education, whereas 10% of white ones do. Black Brazilians complete an average of 4.2 years of education, compared to the white population’s 6.2 years. Only 19% of white Brazilians have had no formal education, versus 36% of Blacks (Buckley 1). That means that, of the 47% of Brazilians who identify themselves as “black” or “brown,” 36% of them have never been so far as kindergarten. Brazil does not completely ignore the plight of non-whites in education. State Universities in Brazil have, in the past decade, gradually instated a race quota—a required number of non-white students to be admitted each year. The definition of non-white is left to students to define for themselves, but it is much less clean-cut than it might be in the United States. Because Brazil’s colonial legacy has led to so many different cultures and so much miscegenation, it is nearly impossible for anyone to define himself or herself as completely white or black. The committees that decide on whether or not a person who has identified themselves as black is truly ‘black enough’ for scholarship money decide nearly randomly, leaving the system wide open for people to take advantage, even if they are not as in need as others. Beyond that, race quotas do nothing but further the racial prejudices and disadvantages already rampant in Brazil today. As one unnamed student told reporters in PBS’ installation of its series Wide Angle: Brazil in Black and White, “[they say] oh, she’s black, she needs help because she’s black…you think I want to be analyzed like this?” (“Wide Angle: Brazil in Black and White”). Unfortunately, black Brazilians face larger obstacles than a backward affirmative education system. Due to racial prejudices and also to the state of near-anarchy in these areas, the slums—particularly outside Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paolo—have become isolated from the justice and bureaucracy that surrounds them in the wealthy, white parts of the city. The only thing the government extends to these areas is law enforcement—one that will shoot without hesitation. Invanilde dos Santos, a Brazilian woman whose son was killed by police in 1998, told reporter Stephen Buckley that the police “were just used to shooting people up here [in the slums] and getting away with it. He died because he was black.” Because he was a soldier, dos Santos’ case was brought to court and the police’s allegations towards him were proved unfounded. Dos Santos’ statement may seem like hyperbole to citizens of fully developed countries who are used to a reasonable and controlled law enforcement, but it is a sad truth. Perhaps hundreds of youths die in these shantytown slums each year at the hand of a law enforcement that knows no other method than barbarism to keep some semblance of order in these areas, which ran out of the boundaries of the law a long time ago. There is no known statistic of how many youths die in a similar manner as Dos Santos. This is in part because of a corrupted government that ignores these “mishaps” and in part because the areas are so unstable and violent that few organizations would dare venture there long enough to collect any sort of reliable census. Victims of these crimes and people like them are cornered by law enforcement. Brazil expects Black people in slums to fit a certain stereotype and are, as in the case of Dos Santos, persecuted and even executed for it regardless of the validity of the evidence. All these factors leave adolescents and even young children with very few options, in terms of both safety and success. Some children attend primary schools, although resources are limited—low teacher salaries and too few textbooks make it all the more easy for children to decide school is a waste of time. In addition, schooling for a child in the slums—particularly a black one—yields little promise and has even less application in that child’s life. Through statistics and anecdotes, it quickly becomes clear that Brazil’s disorganized, muddled education system outside the limits of wealth and white skin has created more problems outside its own—social problems. If children can get access to a school in the first place, the motivation so crucial to keep him or her enrolled is lost. Any vision of success through hard work and education easily disappears behind the needs of orphaned children following the footsteps of their teenage counterparts and irresponsible or drug-addict parents. So, at heart, Brazil’s problem is not one of education. It is not about limited textbooks, unequal funding, or inaccessible schools. It is a social problem, as deeply rooted in racism and in poverty as the people who suffer from it. Brazil is fighting an invisible war: invisible because citizens and police officers refuse to recognize their own prejudices, and war because the UN defines 25,000 or more assassinations a year as a state of war and in 2001 Brazil reported 40,000. United Nations special advisor reported this and more to Heidi Cerneka for //News from Brazil//, saying “while police are important to security, they are not the solution to the problems of hunger, lack of healthcare, lack of schools…in a country with such a striking disparity between the rich and the poor, the temptation to steal is understandable when one has absolutely nothing” (Cerneka 1). Brazil’s colonial legacy has left parts of the population more marginalized than in any other country. Deep-rooted racism over hundreds of years has not shrunk, rather, it has grown even more as the government has tried to sweep these people under a rug of select modern areas. Forcibly and socially deprived of education, jobs, and basic needs of modern life because of the situations they are born into, the downtrodden populations in the city slums of Brazil are left to live out their lives robbed of any agency. As of today, the role of education for Brazil’s forgotten inhabitants of city slums is nonexistent. These people do not relate to the successes others see in education, and it is nowhere near accessible enough to be more than a fleeting few years in a person’s life. The world has learned that this need not be the case. In countries like India, where millions of people suffer in poverty, those same millions are moving, bit by bit, out of the perpetuated cycle they once knew through the opportunities of education. In learning, they find a new agency that gives them and their family’s better personal quality of life and a portal into the global market. Always unique, Brazil is ripe for a similar change. Brazil’s exceptional economic diversity means that, if lifted out of isolation and extreme poverty, the inhabitants of city slums would find a myriad of opportunities, both in technical and white-collar work. In turn, all of these occupations fit into the global economy, ever dependent on the value of the individual. Education will open roads to children in poverty, but right now racism and corruption block those roads. Instead of ignoring the millions of people trapped in slums, the government needs to acknowledge their plight and shift the funding and time they are currently spending on development and Westernization of areas that do not need it. But this is only the beginning of what would be a long and difficult recovery process for Brazil’s lost students. The problem is so deeply rooted that re-allocation of funds towards education would have little or no effect. No matter how high the quality of schools, children and young adults in slums will not find their way there if they are continually barred by racism, poverty, and a lack of motivation. The first step would be to raise the standard of living in these areas. The government must move away from social preaching and instead take initiative to directly improve the homes, health, and job opportunities in poverty-stricken areas. Drug trafficking, one of the main pulls that takes youths out of school because of its financial profits, is also the most dangerous thing to be involved in, both because of civilians and because of police violence. Brazil would do well to adopt and enforce the suggestions of the UN Palermo Convention, or the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime. Once living standards have been established to a level at least somewhat comparable to the level of the middle class in cities, the focus can turn to education. This would begin with a massive highlighting of education’s value for the people in these slums. Using a specially formed tolerant and well-trained police force, the government must infiltrate these areas slowly and with a spirit of negotiation, not force. One option is to offer rewards of some sort—be it food stamps, money, healthcare, and then later scholarship opportunities—to encourage parents to monitor their children’s participation in school. This would not happen overnight, of course. It could take several generations for families and students to realize the value in education beyond incentive programs. Because of this, it is imperative that the Brazilian government begin the process as soon as possible. When, finally, people do begin to see a value in education that both financially and morally outweighs the dangerous and often-illegal alternatives, the government should begin working on the quality of schools. The word ‘begin’ is key—the government must not wait until people complain about the quality of schools but rather foresee this, and once they notice that things are beginning to turn around, quickly and efficiently implement funds and programs to improve school quality. In doing this, Brazil must work hard to grow out of the past pattern of slow development in education. One of the most important changes would be the elimination of race quotas. Affirmative education may have a place in Brazil, but not as an agency-removing system that can be taken advantage of and forces racial definition and analyzing. Additionally, a balance must be found between the two main facets of learning: a traditional liberal arts education and vocational or technical training. The result would be a hybrid, custom-tailored education that has applications both on a universal scale of knowledge and in the individual’s niche in the global economy.

Buckley, Stephen. “Brazil’s Racial Awakening.” __Washington__ __Post.__ Jun. 2000. 1 pp. http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/42/133.html "Brazil in Black and White." Wide Angle. Daljit Dhaliwal, Anchor. PBS, 4 Sep 2007. Cerneka, Heidi. “Violence in Brazil.” __News From Brazil.__ Mar. 2002. 1 pp. 26 Nov. 2007. http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/42/190.html  [|http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/28/056.html] Servico Brasileiro de Justica e Paz. “Two International Reports Criticize Brazil's Human Rights Efforts.” __News from Brazil.__ Dec. 1997. 1 pp. 20 Nov. 2007 http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/42/180.html Andrews, George Reid. “Racial Inequality in Brazil and the United States: A Statistical Comparison.” __Journal of Social History.__ Winter 1992. 229-263. 20 Nov. 2007. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-4529%28199224%2926%3A2%3C229%3ARIIBAT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-5 Burns, Bradford E. “A History of Brazil: Second Edition.” New York: Columbia University Press, 1970 Guillermoprieto, Alma. “Heart That Bleeds: Latin America Now.” New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. Lima, Alceu Amoroso. “Religious Education in Brazil.” Trans. Father M.C. Kiernan, O.F.M. __The Americas.__ Oct. 1958. 159-170 pp. 26 Nov. 2007. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0003-1615%28195810%2915%3A2%3C159%3AREIB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-C McCoy, Don B. “Education in Brazil.” __Peabody__ __Journal of Education.__ Jul. 1959. 39-42 pp. 20 Nov. 2007. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0161-956X%28195907%2937%3A1%3C39%3AEIB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-7