15 October was ‘Teachers’ Day’ in Brazil. This year the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published a survey showing that Brazil ‘leads’ the world in aggression against educators. The ‘day to honour teachers’ is now almost a caricature.
Brazil has 2.6 million teachers, equivalent to 1.2% of the Brazilian population. There are 397,000 teachers in higher education and 2.2 million in compulsory education, 1.7 million of the latter are in public education. They teach some 35 million students from four to 17 years of age, enrolled in 146,065 state schools (2018).
State intimidation in education
The Brazilian state has a tradition of coercion against teachers. The 21 years of criminal intimidation, brutality and murder under the 1964-1985 military dictatorship, funded and supported by US imperialism, have had profound effects on the shape of ideas in the country. The US and British governments trained the Brazilian military in interrogation[1]. Censorship was institutionalised through the Higher Council of Censorship, controlling all areas of communication in Brazilian society. It was justified by a fabricated story of a ‘communist threat’, to unify the Brazilian armed forces and of course that epitome of hypocrisy, the right wing stand by, a ‘fight against corruption’, to increase their support among the middle classes.
Echoing that experience now, teachers’ campaigns and demonstrations for higher salaries and better working conditions have been seriously threatened, censored in the media and subject to persecution. From 2018, during Bolsonaro’s election campaign, academics and researchers were accused of practicing ‘communist doctrine’, ‘cultural Marxism’ or ‘leftist doctrine’ in the classroom. During that campaign and in the first year of Bolsonaro’s mandate, teachers received threats and some had to leave the country, for example Professor Débora Diniz, of the University of Brasília. A huge wave of anonymous letters directed at teachers and higher education institutions was fomented during this period, with hate speech against women, blacks and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Ministerial efforts were also made to rewrite and commercialise school texts.
The scheme to dismantle academic freedom is in keeping with the ideology of the president, and he reiterates it in the choices he has made when appointing the rectors of the country’s federal universities. Since 1990, the president of Brazil in office has chosen the federal university rectors according to a list drawn up by the country’s academics, usually respecting the academic community by appointing the first name on the list. In May 2019 Bolsonaro published a decree allowing the executive branch to veto nominations for university authorities. It then established a system, with the assistance of the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (ABIN), to investigate the background of public office candidates, such as federal university deans and directors – a decision which destroys, in practice, the autonomy that Brazilian public universities have to exercise independent control over their day-to-day operations and curriculum. This was accompanied by a 30% cut in ‘non-mandatory spending’ for federal universities.[2]
The consequences for Brazil’s teachers
In São Paulo, 48% of teachers say they have suffered verbal abuse and 5% physical aggression (Instituto Locomotiva para os Sindicatos dos Professores do Ensino Oficial do Estado de São Paulo). In the Federal District of Sao Paulo, more than 40% of these attacks come from students and 20% from parents (Union of Teachers). Much of the violence results from the deep frustration felt by students and their families as the privatisation of Brazilian education is pushed forward. The budgetary pressures facing state schools meant that, for example, in Ceará, 20% of the 4,000 students who passed the 2009 state education network competition dropped out through lack of support. The extension of compulsory education in 2010 (from four to 17 years from 2016) demanded an increase in public spending on education, and supply was encouraged through the state funding of private provision. This compromise with capitalism by the Workers Party reflected its weak position in the governing coalition, despite its electoral victory that year. Spending on education rose from 3.9% of GDP in 2010 to 6.1% in 2014, but still the amount spent per student in Brazil is the second lowest among OECD countries, at $2,985 per student each year, while the average OECD is $8,952.
Consequently, education privatisation has inhibited equal access and participation, reducing education to a commodity instead of a public good, and infringing on education as a human right. The compulsory privatisation process, made through the state purchase of ‘private systems of education’, and consequently subsidised with public funds, was introduced in Brazil in the early 2000s. It sees the transfer of the management of state schools to private entities, corporations and so-called venture philanthropists, with the transfer of their school curricula to hundreds of municipalities.
Furthermore, educational policy can now be made by this private sector, through the corporate governance of education systems. This sector grew from 2010. The big national publishers such as Grupo and Editora Moderna (with international share holdings) compete in the market of the ‘education systems’, a market on which international publishers Pearson and Santillana have also got their sticky fingers. In the poorest regions, such as Pernambuco and Sao Paulo states, ‘venture philanthropists’ are active as government partners in defining and managing education policy.
There is an intentional lack of regulation in the use of public resources, which has been an important element of propagation of this ‘educational market’ constituted by public schools. In 2010, the business group ‘Brazilian Educational System’ told its shareholders that public schools yielded an important return on investment ‘with a potential market of 24.3 million students’. There is clear evidence of the precarious working conditions of teachers in these privatised schools, compared to those who work in state schools as yet untouched by the money grubbers[3].
According to a survey by the National Confederation of Workers in Education and the Federal University of Minas Gerais, teachers’ working hours have increased by up to 82% during the pandemic. It also shows that 69% say they are afraid and insecure because they do not know what a return to normality will be like after the pandemic.
Brazil and Israel featured at the lower end of the Teacher Status Index with scores of 1 and 6.65 respectively in 2018 (Varkey Foundation). This survey sought to identify the level of respect for teachers in different countries and their social standing. They examined: the profile of teacher respect; teaching as a sought-after profession; a contextual understanding of teachers’ social status; views on pupil respect for teachers.
During the pandemic we could not have expected different behaviour from the president. Bolsonaro ignored all the advice of the World Health Organisation and ordered the country to continue in full swing, with state governors choosing to keep public schools open or not, without the slightest support from the federal government. Pressure from religious and philanthropic entities forced Bolsonaro to announce on 19 October a manoeuvre which suggests a possible increase in teachers’ real salaries by linking them to inflation; however in fact the current law guarantees real gains which puts pressure on the accounts of states and municipalities. Bolsonaro’s duplicity, the use of the National Consumer Price Index, would mean the last increase would have been only about one third of what was given.
Despite all these attacks on workers dedicated to youth, nine teachers from Brazil have been nominated among the 50 finalists for the Global Teacher Prize, which awards international prizes in the area of education.
Annais B and Alvaro M
[1] Watts, Jonathan (10 December 2014) ‘Brazil president weeps as she unveils report on military dictatorship’s abuses’ The Guardian (10 December 2014).
