In my last post, I argued that the author of A Cabeça do Brasileiro appears to be incredibly naive about the task of providing a college education for all of Brazils students - just offer it, and Brazil will become a first world country.
Right now, I'm starting to sense that this naïveté is fairly widespread. One hint came from today's articles about the ENEM exam (see here, for example), which was originally a test to measure what high-school graduates actually know, but has evolved to become more or less like the US's SAT exams (slowly supplanting a system in which students had to take individual entrance exams for each University they wished to apply to). The article is generally about the fact that public schools send proportionally far more students to take the exam than do public schools, a fact that should surprise nobody. Interestingly, the interviewee in the article gives all the credit to the quality of private school teachers while giving no thought to selection bias (that is, the fact that the smartest, wealthiest people in Brazil will make darn sure that their kids will never set foot in a public school. Or to put it another way, why pay for years and years of a private school education if you aren't even going to make your kid apply to college? If you don't care whether your kid goes to college or not, you probably put him in a free public school).
Here is the part that most interested me though:
There's still another matter that demonstrates the gravity of the situation. Public school students that take the exam in the year they graduate from high school are exempt from the R$ 35 sign-up fee for the federal exam. As the result demonstrate, however, many of the students favored by this policy still missed the test.
"This makes us rethink the idea that just freeing these students from the payment is enough. We need other mechanisms for incentivizing this group of young Brazilians," says Isabel Cappelletti, professor with the School of Education of the São Paulo Catholic University and a specialist in educational evaluations. "The new ENEM, as this new test model became known, was meant to encourage greater democratization of access to higher education, but this still isn't happening."
What? Students that have spent 9 years in educational crapholes (and many of which remain functionally illiterate on the day of their graduation) aren't rushing to college after the government did away with a R$ 35 fee?
The fact that this is news to educational specialists is a bit disturbing. There is a bug in Brazilian policy making, it seems, that convinces people that the problem in its entirety is "access". If you build it or make it free, they will come. This attitude can be seen not only in education, but in culture too. A large part of the Ministry of Culture's strategy for fomenting the arts (and along with it, the economy) is to increase access to things like cinema by shipping cinema equipment to every city. Once the people have access, so the logic goes, they'll fall in love with it and start paying for it in the future. It might have some effect, but I'm pretty certain that somewhere, some official will very soon will say to the press or to himself "This makes us rethink the idea that just giving people free Brazilian movies and equipment is enough to make them prefer Glauber Rocha movies rather than Friday the 13th part IV."
And why do you think Brazilians read a reported 1.4 books per year on average? You guessed it! The problem is access, in several sources I've come across over the months (and which I'll investigate and cite further later). But this is nothing more than incredible wishful thinking. If the problem is access, why have I never seen anyone in the library here in Senhor do Bonfim? If everyone wants books but just can't find them, isn't there a killing to be made by opening a book store around here? Of course not. The problem is not (or at least, not in its entirety) access. I can't tell you in a sentence what the problem is, but anyone who thinks that they can solve a serious educational problem here with one magic bullet is dreaming.
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