Photo © Michael Sommers.
My cleaning lady, Laura, doesn’t know how to read.
I first met Laura over 10 years ago, when I moved into an apartment with Bahian friends. Laura had just started working for the friend whose apartment it was and, for an astoundingly long time, she fooled us all.
Laura was always amazingly punctual so it never dawned on us that she didn’t know how to tell time.
She didn’t have a phone (these were pre cell phone days when land lines in Brazil cost a small fortune) so we never dreamed that she didn’t know how to dial one.
She knew how to get around town with great ease by bus so we never imagined that instead of reading the destinations on the front, she recognized the companies’ logos and memorized the digits that indicated the number of the route.
What I learned from Laura was how very good illiterates can be at hiding their illiteracy and finding creative ways to “pass.”What I learned from Laura was how very good illiterates can be at hiding their illiteracy and finding creative ways to “pass”. Of course, like many under- and/or uneducated people in Brazil, Laura’s lack of learning sorely limits her professionally, economically, and socially.
I was thinking about Laura this week when I came across an interesting article published in The New York Times. Entitled “Education Gaps Limit Brazil’s Reach”, it analyzes how Brazil’s poor state of education is threatening to put a crimp in the country’s massive economic development.
Despite the fact that business is booming and Brazil has proved its mettle as “a global force, riding a commodity and domestic consumption boom to become one of the largest economies in the world,” Brazil is lagging behind the other BRIC wonder nations, China, Russia, and India, due to one big factor: the astoundingly low education levels of so much of the population.
According to a government study published earlier this year, close to a quarter of the 25 million Brazilians entering the labor force this year were not qualified to meet the demands of the labor market. As such, it’s little wonder that in some areas of Brazil, there is actually an excess of available jobs – and a lack of qualified candidates to fill them.
I have many Brazilian friends who are teachers and professors, most of them in the public sector, and for years I’ve heard, first-hand, about the sorry state of the public education system in Brazil. As such, the revelation that, in 2006, Brazilian 15-year-olds tied for 49th place out of 56 countries on the Program for International Student Assessment reading exam (and fared even worse in math and science) doesn’t come as too much of a surprise, although the statistics underscore the shocking extent of the situation.
In Brazil, education gets off to a bumpy start from the outset: an estimated 28 percent of first graders end up repeating a year (one of the highest rates on the planet), and from then on, things gradually go downhill. By the time they get to high school, many students have repeated so many times that they are often in their mid-late teens (although with reading and math levels of 9 to 10 year-olds). Bored and frustrated, many simply drop out. They often lack the support of parents – who have low or no education and, struggling to get by, could use the extra income of a working adolescent – and teachers whose education levels are often as low as their motivation (pitiful salaries don’t help).
As the Times article points out, under Lula’s presidency, things have taken a turn for the better, in no small part because the President – who famously dropped out of school after Grade 4 – has made education his personal mission. In recent years, enrollment has increased as has the rate of students that graduate from middle school (now at 47 percent). The Bolsa Família program – whereby poor families receive subsidies for each child who goes to school – has provided incentive for children of an estimated 12 million families to get an education, while government scholarships have allowed some 700,000 low-income students to attend private universities.
The government also offers free literacy classes in towns and cities throughout Brazil for people of all ages. After it finally dawned on us that Laura couldn’t read, we waged a major campaign in an effort to get her to go to one such course at a school near her house. We went all out: purchasing notebooks, pens, and pencils. When she finally did enroll, she seemed to be a lot more motivated by the free snacks and the gossip during break time than by the chance to master the alphabet.
The day Laura showed up, shyly brandishing a piece of paper, on which she had printed out her name in wobbly block letters on a scrap of paper, was very moving. For reasons that have remained murky, she never got beyond her name.
For months, we dutifully continued to ask Laura how school was, and she dutifully replied “fine.” Deep down, however, we knew that her main motivation for going to school was to not disappoint us (at a certain point, she even started complaining about the quality of the snacks – the reason some of her classmates attended).
Finally, to let her off the hook, we just stopped asking.
