65% want to choose what they will study in high school – 03/12/2024 – Education

A new survey by Datafolha shows that 65% of students aged 14 to 16 say they want to have the option to choose part of the curriculum they will study in high school. The survey was commissioned by the organization Todos pela Educação and was released this Monday (11).

The survey interviewed 462 students in this age group, enrolled in public and private schools from all regions of the country. The interviews were carried out between January 29 and February 9, 2024. The margin of error is five percentage points (plus or minus less), with a confidence level of 95%.

According to the survey, 35% of young people said they preferred a school that offered, part of the time, the same subjects for all students and, part of the time, the possibility of deepening knowledge and subjects of greater interest.

Another 30% prefer a school that combines one part with the same subjects for all students and another with the possibility of taking a professional technical course.

Thus, the research concluded that 65% of students agree with the changes in the new secondary education, implemented throughout the country in 2022. The model predicts that 60% of the workload of the three years of this stage is common to all, with regular subjects . And the other 40% are made up of electives within large areas of knowledge, the so-called training itineraries.

According to the Todos pela Educação survey, 35% of students responded that they would like to study with the previous model, before the secondary education reform, when everyone had the same subjects.

As shown by the Sheet, not all public schools are able to offer the training itineraries chosen by students. In the last three years, many of them ended up being forced to study a different training path than the one they chose.

Students and teachers also criticize that the new curriculum deprived students of class time devoted to regular subjects, such as Portuguese and mathematics. Instead, disciplines such as “gourmet brigadeiro” or “how to become a millionaire” were created.

Olavo Nogueira, executive director of Todos pela Educação, said that the survey did not seek to evaluate the approval of the new secondary education, but says that the results indicate that young people want the “essence” of the new model.

“Although the research does not seek to evaluate the new secondary education as it is today, which has a series of problems already highlighted and that need to be corrected, the data reinforces that the essence, the principles of the new secondary education, are, in fact, defended by the majority of young people who are now entering the stage, especially among those who say they know the new model well”, said Nogueira.

The survey showed that 53% of respondents said they were unaware/not well informed about the new secondary education.

The Todos pela Educação survey has a different result from a survey carried out by UNESCO Brasil at the end of last year, when the majority of students, teachers and managers said they were dissatisfied with the changes.

In the UNESCO survey, 56% of students said they were dissatisfied, the rate rose to 76% among teachers and 66% among managers, central parts of the learning process.

The UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) survey interviewed 1,200 students, 800 teachers and 400 managers between June 23rd and October 6th. The universe represented by the sample is 18 thousand schools, 481 thousand teachers and 2.1 million students, with a confidence level of 95%. The margins of error are 3% for the student sample, 4% for the teaching sample and 6% for the managers sample.