Development & Aid, Education, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean, Poverty & SDGs

EDUCATION-BRAZIL: Pockets of Illiteracy, Despite Strides

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 12 2008 (IPS) - Staying illiterate even after going to school is the plight of thousands of boys and girls in Brazil and is proof of the shortfalls of the country’s educational system, in particular in poverty-ridden areas. But the tide is beginning to turn, as can be observed among the country’s youngest children.

Social indicators from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), based on 2007 data, show that schools are failing to teach 2.1 million of the country’s seven to 14-year-olds to read and write – 7.5 percent of all students.

That number, however, should not include the one million seven-year-olds who are in first grade and are just learning to read and write. Another 605,000 eight-year-olds are in the same situation, as they have had a late start in school, according to André Lázaro, the Ministry of Education’s Secretary for Continuing Education, Literacy and Diversity.

The figures drop sharply in the following grades, with only 97,000 third grade students still illiterate. But what matters, Lázaro told IPS, is that they are staying in school, where they stand a very good chance of learning to read and write. Brazil’s educational system is “on the right track,” which the literacy rates confirm, he argued.

The overall illiteracy rate for Brazilians over the age of 15 stands at 10 percent, but that is mainly due to the older generations. Illiteracy among people over 40 is 17.2 percent, but drops to 1.7 percent among people between the ages of 15 and 17. More than 90 percent of all illiterate people in Brazil are older than 25.

“Projections for the coming decades point to continued improvement,” said Lázaro, who is confident that it is only a matter of stepping up efforts. To that end, the government of leftwing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has guaranteed the necessary financing for the Fund for the Development of Basic Education, and consolidated assessment mechanisms to “identify problems in each school.”

The third leg of this policy is the National Public System for the Training of Teachers, an Education Ministry project that is being designed with the participation of society, with the possibility of submitting suggestions until Nov. 24. With this three-pronged policy, “in 10 to 15 years we’ll be seeing a radical shift” in Brazilian education, said the official.

But progress is not so linear. Illiteracy persists primarily in rural areas, where the rate is three times higher than in urban areas. The 20 percent rate found in the northeast, Brazil’s most impoverished region, is twice the national average and almost four times the rates of the south and southeast, the most developed regions.

Eighteen percent of the poorest sector of the country’s population is illiterate, but that proportion drops to 1.4 percent among families with a per capita income of more than two minimum wages (roughly 380 dollars), which indicates that the problem, like poor overall performance in school, often goes hand in hand with poverty.

Another negative indicator, grade retention (repeating a grade), is also more pronounced in the northeast, where 38.8 percent of students are one grade behind for their age, as compared to 16 percent in the south and southeast. Inadequate learning leads many children to repeat grades and eventually drop out.

Brazil has achieved almost universal enrolment: 97.6 percent of all children seven to 14 years of age. But researchers and authorities agree that education – which they see as the motor for development – is often lacking in quality in this country.

“Education is only as good or as bad as its educators,” Lázaro said. Which is why further training for teachers is a priority concern and will be addressed through both classroom and distance courses, forcing teachers to use the Internet and thus get better acquainted with the world of their students, which will in turn contribute to greater improvements in education, he added.

However, Ludmila de Andrade, a Federal University of Rio de Janeiro professor who is currently studying for a teacher training postgraduate degree in France, is not so optimistic. She told IPS that the teachers interested in improving themselves and incorporating innovative teaching skills “are a minority, an elite.”

The vast majority of teachers are unmotivated due to the wages they earn, which are too low to even allow them to purchase books to read, in addition to the poor conditions they work in, including rundown school buildings that are often foul-smelling, leaky or too noisy and which stand in stark contrast with the shiny new evangelical churches sprouting like mushrooms around the country, she said.

The country needs to increase training, pay teachers more and re-legitimise them in the eyes of society, as their social prestige is falling fast, she says. According to de Andrade, only then will government policies work.

While Brazil has made strides in terms of literacy levels, it loses the initial ground gained because there is no progress at the next stage, in teaching children to use the reading and writing skills they have acquired.

That is, students are merely taught to “copy and repeat, but not to produce culture,” de Andrade says. The country has known for a long time ‘what’ it has to do, that it has to “bring the world into the schools, connecting them with real life,” but the problem is ‘how’ to do it amidst so many shortfalls, the professor said.

National and international assessments of the state of basic education in the country are “terrible,” placing Brazil below countries that are even further behind in other development indicators, de Andrade noted.

Recently, the government implemented more measures aimed at improving the level of Brazil’s education, including raising the number of mandatory school years to nine, as well as efforts to expand pre-school coverage and adapt education to rural conditions, in addition to guaranteeing greater budget allocations and putting in place a continuing education plan for teachers.

But de Andrade said that now it is necessary to focus specifically on primary and middle school teachers. Postgraduate studies like hers, which educators are highly encouraged to pursue, should not be aimed at training specialised researchers, but rather better teachers, combining knowledge with teaching practice, she added.