Learning about Education

As another week goes by, I find myself picking up more and more interesting details about Brazil in unexpected places.  Exploring the downtown markets, overhearing a fight on the sidewalk or listening to commonly hummed songs give cultural depth to our trip.

Professor Daniela Vargas

We began our day at PUC-Rio. Our first lecture of the day was on inequality and social justice with an emphasis on who has the access to higher education.  The educational system in Brazil is similar to the system of the US but Brazil´s is affected more by their history of social inequality.  Students in Brazil attend one year of basic reading and writing then go to primary school for eight years.  They finish off with secondary school for three years, our high school equivalent.

Unfortunately, we learned that there is a large gap in the quality of education that students get depending on their attendance to public or private schools.  Public schools do not get adequate funding and have a strong shortage of teachers.  Professor Daniela Vargas explained that the typical salary of public school teachers is 860 R$/month (roughly 430 US$).  She expressed with vigor, “I couldn’t get someone to clean my house three days a week for that!” Teaching here tops the list of underpaid professions.

We learned that the type of university a student will attend is based solely on one post-secondary education test.  The Exame Nacional do Ensino Medio is given to all students wanting to attend a university and is given on one day each year.  Better educated students score higher on the exam and therefore get into the free public university system.  Scores on the ENEM are the only criteria of the selection process.  Extracurricular activities, volunteering, and the like have no bearing.  This seems much different than the entrance process of the US where a well-rounded student is preferred.  This year over 1,200,000 candidates took the ENEM in hope to get one of 108,000 seats in a public university.  Students attending private secondary schools have a clear advantage in this system as they are better prepared.

To combat this gap, programs like PUC- Rio’s Programa Universidade para todos have been created.  Schools that have adopted this program allow ten percent of their seats to be filled by students that meet the following criteria:
·    Must be a graduate of a public high school or have had a full scholarship from a private school
·      Must have a family income of less that 2,600 R$/month (roughly 1,300 US$)

Programs like this have been helping students that want to excel and attend college and will help close the socio-economic gap.  The Brazilian Supreme Court has also passed several influential decisions this year including the notion that racial quotas are constitutional and necessary to repair the history of racial discrimination in Brazil.

There are similarities and differences between Brazil and the US’s educational systems.  I will take away from this lecture both hope for Brazil’s future in bridging the gap in the system, as well as gratefulness for the opportunities we all have in the US.