One BRIC That Needs More Mortar… Boards

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s extremely popular President (elected in 2003), never made it past the fourth grade. Even as his policies are moving Brazil forward as a global force, he is also the poster boy for everything that is wrong with this super-hot Latin American economy – the rather abysmal condition of this nation’s profoundly underperforming educational system. Lula’s father used to beat his sons when they wasted time going to school instead of working. While recently discovered and off-shore, massive new oil reserves all but assure a steady and enormous cash flow for this Portuguese-speaking South American giant, the country is still a highly polarized society with vast hordes of illiterate citizens struggling at the edge of survival.

With a population approaching 200 million, Brazil simply cannot begin to fulfill the demand for educated and skilled workers ready for the 21^st century; even as it shares the “BRIC” (Brazil, Russian, India, China) moniker with the earth’s other super-hot economies… even in the worst economic downturn since The Great Depression. The notorious favelas (the big city slums where the line between law and survival are often crossed by both police and organized crime) are unwanted signatures of dangerous desperation that grips millions of Brazilians every day.

With growing riches from oil revenues, the country really has its work cut out for it, trailing most of the developing world that surrounds it when it comes to education: “Over the past decade, Brazil’s students have scored among the lowest of any country’s students taking international exams for basic skills like reading, mathematics and science, trailing fellow Latin American nations like Chile, Uruguay and Mexico… Brazilian 15-year-olds tied for 49th out of 56 countries on the reading exam of the Program for International Student Assessment, with more than half scoring in the test’s bottom reading level in 2006, the most recent year available. In math and science, they fared even worse.” New York Times (September 5^th).

The jury-built shanties in the favelas range in relative quality from some with televisions and refrigerators from “found” electricity to true bottom-end structures that provide no real protection from the elements, especially the heavy rains that can wash entire hillsides away. Drug lords rule just as vigilante “death squads” (looking a lot like off-duty cops playing a mean and unofficial SWAT role) wreak vengeance that often claims children as frequent victims. Wikipedia tells us how bad the situation really is: “According to national census data, from 1980–1990, the overall growth rate of Rio de Janeiro dropped by 8 percent, but the favela population increased by 41 percent. After 1990, the city's growth rate leveled at 7 percent, but the favela population increased by 24 percent. However, a report of the United Nations, released in 2010 shows that Brazil has reduced its slum population by 16%, now corresponding to about 26% of the overall population of the nation, face to more than 30% in 2000.”

Can Brazil take advantage of the oil money fast enough to join its fellow BRICs in the global economic race or is it so far behind that it is unlikely to catch up for decades? “[T]he nation’s educational shortcomings are leaving many Brazilians on the sidelines. More than 22 percent of the roughly 25 million workers available to join Brazil’s work force this year were not considered qualified to meet the demands of the labor market, according to a government report in March… ‘In certain cities and states we have a problem hiring workers, even though we do have employment,’ said Márcio Pochmann, president of the Institute for Applied Economic Research, the government agency that produced the March report. Earlier estimates showed that tens of thousands of jobs went unclaimed because there were not enough qualified professionals to fill them.”

Progress is squeaking forward: “The government has had some notable successes, including a program that has created about 700,000 scholarships for low-income students to attend private colleges, an effort lauded by education specialists… Under Mr. da Silva, the government also opened more than 180 vocational schools — compared with 140 added during the previous 93 years — and has administered a new test to evaluate student performance… School enrollment has continued to climb, a trend that began in the 1990s under the previous president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and middle school graduation rates have risen under Mr. da Silva by 13 percentage points to 47 percent…

“But those successes fall short of the urgent thrust for change that some education specialists were hoping to see from Mr. da Silva, considering his background. Not nearly enough was done to improve the quality of education and teaching methods, and the president has not used his bully pulpit to inspire the nation to demand more from its teachers and schools, they say.” The Times. Will time run out for the current generations seeking a future? How many Brazilians will be left behind as this “economic miracle” accelerates through the economy? Time will provide the answers, but the opportunities in this huge country are legion.

I’m Peter Dekom, and Brazil is still going to outgrow the United States for the foreseeable future.