Brazilian students arrive at high school knowing little
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One of the causes why secondary education is a failure in Brazil is the low level of knowledge of many of the students who reach this stage of basic education. The reform of secondary education, whose implementation deadlines were suspended by the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT), tries to provide a way out for these students who, due to their profile and lack of content, tend to abandon basic education with no professional future.
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Most Brazilian students enter the 1st year of high school with knowledge equivalent to what their peers from other countries learn in the 5th or 6th year of elementary school. This low quality of Brazilian elementary education, pointed out by national assessments, is also internationally confirmed by the International Student Assessment Program (PISA), coordinated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which assesses reading, math and science from 15-year-old students from over 72 countries and economies.
In 2018, Brazil was below average levels achieved in other countries in the three areas. In reading, it was in 57th place, with 413 points (the average was 487). In mathematics, in 70th position, with 384 points (average of 489). In science, in 64th place, with 404 points (average of 489).
“In Brazil, it is conventional to teach nothing, practically nothing, until the 5th grade. Then, very little until the 9th grade; and everything gets complex in high school”, laments Ilona Becskeházy, master and doctor in educational policy. “High school students are very immature intellectually, they bring little content. In three years, high school cannot teach, because the student is immature and cannot understand. So, the student leaves the system, as he does not understand what he is learning”, she adds.
In this scenario, to avoid the so-called “neither nor” young people, who neither work nor study, the secondary education reform tried to avoid school dropouts with training itineraries to prepare for university and technical education (as occurs with 50% of students from countries such as Germany and South Korea).
“The new secondary education law seeks to solve some of the problems, in particular, the low workload and the excess of subjects, doing like other countries that have good educational systems”, explains Claudia Costin, director of the Center for Educational Policies at FGV and former – Director of Education at the World Bank. “By making young people exposed to disciplines and choosing an area of deepening”, she highlights.
Claudia Costin also shows that in Brazil there is a prejudice against vocational technical education, but it is necessary to advance in this area. “Both young people who do not go to university or those who want to go can take courses that dialogue with the world of work. Paraná, for example, inserted programming in every year. I think it’s a good idea, this will help professionalize young people and prepare them for a world that is more complex”.
Anamaria Camargo, Master in Education with a focus on eLearning at the University of Hull, in England, comments that the idea of diversifying curricular itineraries and focusing on technical education shows students that university is not the only or best path for everyone, as in other countries, whose technical positions have the same financial and social recognition as graduates. “If Brazil does not change, we will be even further behind”.
For Ilona, one of the necessary adjustments in the reform of secondary education is precisely to bring the education networks closer to the productive sector, to give young people the opportunity of internships and effective preparation in a profession. “What we can’t let secondary education be a huge producer of young neither-nors, that is, they neither study nor work”, she warns.
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