Читать книгу The Political Economy of the BRICS Countries - Группа авторов - Страница 122

The Brazilian colonial economy, founded on large rural properties and slave labor, paid little attention to formal education for men and none whatsoever for women. Isolation, social stratification, and patriarchal family relations favored a power structure based on the limitless authority of landowners. According to Ribeiro (2000), the Iberian cultural tradition, transposed from Portugal to its Brazilian colony, considered women as inferior beings who had no need to learn to read and write. The educational work of the Jesuits significantly contributed to strengthening male predominance; its priests had a liking for dogmatic forms of thinking and preached the maximum authority of Church and state (Heime, 1975).

With the arrival of the Portuguese royal family in Brazil and Independence in 1822, Brazilian society began to have a more complex structure. International immigration and economic diversification increased the demand for education, which started being seen as an instrument for rising socially through the intermediary social strata (Beltrao and Diniz Alves, 2009). In this new context, the country’s leaders voiced their concern with female education for the very first time. The Empire’s first legislators established that primary school education should be the responsibility of the state and open to girls, who were primarily schooled by female teachers. But due to a lack of qualified female teachers and lack of interest in the parents, education did not reach a significant percentage of female students (UNICEF, 1982).

In the first part of the 19^th century, the first institutions aimed at educating women began to appear, although in a dual teaching picture, with clear gender specializations. Generally speaking, primary education, with its strong moral and social content aimed at strengthening the role of the woman as wife and mother, was meant only for females. Female high school education was largely restricted to teacher training, or in other words, preparing female teachers for the primary school courses. Women were still excluded from higher levels of education during the 19^th century. The first school was set up in Niterói, in 1835, followed by another in Bahia, in 1836. Until the final years of the empire, normal schools were few in number and almost insignificant in terms of student enrolment (Hahner, 1981).

If females found it difficult to have access to elementary education, the situation was more dramatic when it came to higher education, which was completely and unmitigatedly male dominated. Women were excluded from the first courses in medicine, engineering, and law that sprang up in the country. The imperial decree that gave women the right to enroll in a university course dates back to 1881. However, it was difficult to overcome these barriers because high school studies were essentially male-oriented, in addition to being expensive, and normal courses did not qualify women for entry to universities. It is important to note that during the 19^th century and the first half of the 20^th century female exclusion from high school courses made it unfeasible for women to enter university. So, duality and gender segmentation were present in the Brazilian educational system since the beginning, with women having lower literacy rates and restricted access to higher levels of education (Romanelli, 2001).

The Brazilian Constitution of 1891 sanctioned the decentralization of education into a dualist scheme: the federal government was responsible for creating and controlling higher and secondary school educational institutions and the states were responsible for setting up schools and monitoring and controlling elementary education, as well as high-school-level professional education. It included normal schools for girls and technical schools for boys (Beltrao and Diniz Alves, 2009, n. 34). While the educational system expanded quantitatively at this time, there was little by way of qualitative change.

The literacy rate of the Brazilian population grew during the Old Republic (1889–1930), despite the continuing high levels of illiteracy. Educational exclusion was obviously always greater for Afro-Brazilians (Beltrão and Novellino, 2002). The enrolment rates of Brazilian women in secondary and higher education increased at the beginning of the 20^th century, but by much less so than those of men. For instance, between 1907 and 1912 in the Federal District, female presence in high school courses corresponded to less than a quarter of all students and in university courses it did not reach 1.5% (see Table 1). It is worth remembering that Rio de Janeiro had one of the best rates of education in the country (Beltrao and Diniz Alves, 2009, n. 34).

Table 1:Number of people enrolled in high schools and universities in the Federal District — 1907–1912.

Source: Statistics of the 20th century, IBGE (2003).

The reasons why the level of Brazilian investment in education was low owes its origins in the primary products export-driven economic model that had been based on slavery. While the population remained in the countryside, with its archaic means of production, schools exercised no important role in qualifying human resources, being merely an agent for educating people on how to enjoy their leisure time or for preparing for self-employed professional careers, in the case of men, or for being primary school teachers or housewives, in the case of women (Beltrao and Diniz Alves, 2009).

By redirecting Brazilian development toward the domestic market and to the urban, industrial sector, the Revolution of 1930 led to the first public policies for the masses, especially for those who lived in urban areas. The new demands made by industrialization and urban services had an influence on the content and expansion of education. But, as the expansion of capitalism was not homogenous all over Brazil, most of the expansion demanding for schools occurred in regions where capitalist relations were more advanced (Beltrao and Diniz Alves, 2009).

During the period of the so-called Populist Pact (1945–1964), despite popular pressure for the democratization of education, the ‘aristocratic’ character of schools was maintained with the agreement of the ruling elite, making the expansion of schools occur in a manner that was unplanned and inadequately financed. It is important to point out that only in 1961, with the Guidelines and Bases of Brazilian Education Law (LDB) (Beltrao and Diniz Alves, 2009), was the equivalence of all high school courses guaranteed, thus opening up the possibility for women who were doing teacher training to sit for university entrance exams. So, it was from the 1960s that Brazilian women had a bigger possibility of attending university, and it was only in the 1970s that the reversal of the gender gap in university education began.

As industrialization and urbanization in the country began to intensify, the educational system grew both horizontally and vertically. The military governments that came to power after 1964 drew their inspiration from the North American model. They took measures to meet the growing demand for places and professional qualifications, which was also in accordance with their international commitments. The alliance between military and techno-bureaucracy made it possible for large growth in the number of postgraduate courses. The objectives were to produce competent teachers for the universities themselves, stimulate development of scientific research, and ensure the formation of intellectuals who were qualified to respond to the needs of national development (Cunha, 2000). The expansion of education in Brazil continued with the process of redemocratization in the country, with installation of the ‘New Republic’ in 1985. In the 1990s, public policies were developed that were aimed at maintaining children in school (School Scholarship Scheme) and making an effort at providing universal basic education (Beltrao and Diniz Alves, 2009, n. 34).

In the higher education sector, there was major growth in private universities, and the number of students enrolled in them greatly exceeded the number in public universities. This general expansion of places in Brazilian education particularly favored women. In the second half of the 20^th century, women managed to reverse the gender gap in education at all levels. They knew how to take advantage of the opportunities created by the social transformations that were occurring in the country (Beltrao and Diniz Alves, 2009, n. 34). For instance, in 2007 53.3% of newly enrolled university students were women and 55% or more of first-year students had been women for the last 15 years. Therefore, all the levels of education sector were dominated by women who were in majority at every level in Brazil, and thus the average rate of schooling among Brazilian women became more than 1 year higher than that of men. However, women still earned 30% less than men for the same work, and even in the Brazilian congress they occupied less than 10% of the seats.⁹

The absence of gender equity had extended to education itself. School curricula, textbooks, and teaching methods reinforced stereotypes that devalued the role of women and confined them to the home and to low-status jobs and careers. It also projected ‘hard’ science and technology education at the universities to be a male domain. The non-governmental Human Development Network of Brazil pointed out that despite the superior education achievements made by women, it had no impact on their treatment on the workforce, where they continued to face major disadvantages when it came to employment conditions, negotiations, and promotions (Beltrao and Diniz Alves, 2009, n. 34).

The Organization of American States (OAS) on its ‘Brazil Report’ in the framework of the Non-Sexist and Anti-Discrimination Education Campaign by the Acao Educativa Organization in collaboration with ECOS — Communication and Sexuality part of the reference Centre for the victims of violence of the Sedes Sapientiae Institute of Sao Paulo (CNRVV) coordinated by CLADEM (LAC Community for the Defence of Women’s Rights) — are attempting to deal with challenges of social gender relations in guaranteeing human rights in education. They are critical of the Brazilian state’s reports which speak of gender equity (between men and women) in education. These mostly emphasize the increasing literacy and better performance of women in education. The OAS Report puts forth the persistent inequalities among the Brazilian women. The progress in indicators of access and performance is marked by inequality among women according to income, race, ethnicity, and residence (rural/urban), especially Afro-Brazilian and indigenous women. These women also face unequal access to quality education and livelihood (Beltrao and Diniz Alves, 2009, n. 34).

But above all, the reversal in the gender gap has been a triumph that resulted from a historical effort by the women’s movement as part of a more general struggle for equal rights between the sexes that involved countless social players. This did not only happen in Brazil, but was part of a worldwide change whereby the role of women in society was being redefined (Therborn, 2004). The introduction of the various social programs in education, employment, health, and housing by the government produced various levels of success. PBF is considered to be one of the most successful social initiatives undertaken by the successive governments of Cardoso, Lula, and Dilma.