Lack of requirements keeps Brazil among the world’s education leaders

The poor performance of Brazilian students in the latest edition of Pisa, an international exam carried out with young people from 81 countries and economies, has a series of causes related mainly to the low level of demand and the ideologization of teaching, according to education experts consulted by People’s Gazette.

The country ranked 64th in mathematics, 53rd in reading and 61st in science among the 81 nations evaluated. The performance is worse than that of Latin American countries such as Mexico, Costa Rica, Uruguay and Chile. The scores are well below the general average of the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), responsible for the assessment: students in Brazil achieved a score of 379 in mathematics, 410 in reading and 403 in science; the OECD student average was 480 in mathematics, 482 in reading and 491 in science.

“We urgently need to change. We cannot continue to make our students spend years and years in schools and not learn to read, write and count in the same way that their peers in other countries do. Brazilian children have all the potential and all possibilities, like any other children around the world”, says Renan Sargiani, president of the Edube Institute (Institute for Evidence-Based Education) and post-doctorate in Education from Harvard University.

For him, “the problem is not there at 15 years old, when they take Pisa, but much earlier”. “The difficulties begin in early childhood education, in the early years of elementary school, when children have significant difficulties with literacy,” he adds.

Sargiani criticizes Brazil’s stagnation, which does not promote radical changes despite the continued negative results in education. “In this period of more than 10 years that we have seen the stagnant PISA results, what we observed is that the policies were very close, very similar, there were no major changes. We had reports, for example, from the Academy Brazilian Science Journal of 2011 pointing out that literacy policies were out of step in Brazil with what more contemporary science says, with what the strongest evidence says about how children learn to read and write and how we can teach. And these changes have not yet reached the classroom.”

The expert recalls that countries such as France, the United States, Portugal and Chile, which adopted evidence-based educational policies, have reaped the rewards of improving the results of international indicators. “And I think this is one of the reasons why Brazil still hasn’t improved. The fact that it doesn’t follow the evidence and doesn’t have consistency in its policies,” he says.

The rupture of public policies, for him, is also a reason for stagnation. “Sometimes we start to align our path, and then the government changes, and things change again and become increasingly difficult. Here in Brazil we have an example of Ceará and Sobral, more specifically, in which policies have, even with a change of government, remained with the same focus. And then the results have consistently improved.”

Lack of demand and ideologization are main factors in the disastrous result

For educator Anamaria Camargo, president and executive director of Livre pra Escolher, one of the problems with education in Brazil is the lack of accountability of institutions.

“Schools do not have any system of accountability. It doesn’t matter what level of performance students have: there is no system that holds managers or the Secretary of Education accountable. There is no price paid for error. On the contrary. Typically, when students are doing poorly and not learning, this is used as a justification to receive more resources. The incentive is perverse in this sense. There is no incentive, for example, for teachers who are dedicated, well prepared and who work together with the student when you know that a teacher who works in the same school but is not dedicated, is poorly prepared, receives the same salary. The risk to both of them of losing their job at school is exactly the same – that is, none. The stimuli are wrong”, he criticizes.

In her view, the big problem with the Brazilian educational system is that it “exists to maintain itself and interest groups”. “The student is a mere excuse for the system to receive resources. When the result doesn’t come, nothing changes. The tax payer continues to be forced to support the system that doesn’t work”, she states.

There is also a serious problem, according to her, in the selection and training of teachers. “We continue to select teachers from among the worst high school students. We know this when we see the Enem cutoff score for a pedagogy course. The person, often functionally illiterate, arrives at college and will receive a teacher training course that is very deficient, often based on pseudoscience. Even more so in times of ideologization, identity Marxism and ‘wokism’. This is the teacher who leaves colleges. And he still arrives in a classroom with unprepared students, who come with gaps enormous amounts of learning from years ago”, he observes.

Teacher training in Brazil needs to return to rice and beans, says teaching specialist

For Thiago Machado, specialist in didactics and teacher training and master in Science Teaching from UnB, the poor training of teachers is, today, the biggest problem in Brazilian education.

“If we look at the countries that are at the top of Pisa, and we see the policies that were made in recent years that led to the results, we see a heavy investment in teacher training. This does not mean investment in the form of money. We hear a lot about how investing more money in education would make it improve. It’s not in that sense. It’s in quality, in what is taught to teachers as a tool for them to work in the classroom”, he explains.

He recalls that, in the 1960s and 1970s, pedagogical trends began to emerge in Brazil that condemned techniques “of the so-called ‘traditional education'” in an indistinct way, wanting to erase the methodology that was applied.

“There really were some problems at some points, but this cannot be generalized. There is that caricature of the spanking, of the repressive teacher. At that time, didactics began to be thrown in the trash. Didactics is the discipline that talks about methods and techniques within of the classroom. The discussions began to be much more in the social, ‘philosophical’ scope – and that is in quotation marks, because it is said to be philosophical, but it is not exactly like that –, and didactics, which is the discipline that works with teaching techniques”, he comments.

Today, in pedagogy courses, didactics has become an irrelevant issue, which, for Machado, creates an army of teachers devoid of essential tools for exercising their profession. “Any profession needs technique. A doctor, for example, when making a diagnosis, has a ‘toolbox’ of techniques at his disposal. Depending on the diagnosis, he will look for a technique for his case”, he observes. “This should also apply to teachers. They need techniques to evaluate the student and, based on this evaluation, look for the best tool. This, today, does not exist in Brazilian education. Teacher training does not teach this. This is the great thing problem.”

Like Sargiani, he criticizes the lack of evidence base for choosing educational methodologies in Brazil. “There is a lot of talk today about the risk of denying science, but if we take what neuroscience brings today regarding education, and compare it with what was done in so-called traditional education, there is a lot of agreement in several aspects – and disagreement with what is preached today as what would be good in education.”

One of the clearest examples of this, according to him, is the demonization of memorization. “We hear a lot about how memorization, which they call a pejorative form of ‘memorisation’, is bad. They want to leave aside the main skill so that someone can think or learn something. I can’t learn anything without having memory, because memory is where we store all the raw material of thought”, he comments. For Machado, it is “extremely harmful for learning to condemn memory”.

He further criticizes the emphasis on what is called “critical thinking”. “We have an Enem test that requires students to solve problems that sometimes even experts in the field cannot solve,” he says. “How do you want a student to have critical sense if he doesn’t even know how to read properly, if he doesn’t have enough language development to even express himself properly? The most we’ll have are reproductions of arguments that someone has already thought of for them. This is not critical thinking”, he concludes.