Hopes for the Future

“Someday you’re going to go to college. You’ll study law. We’ll put you in a class of informâtica [something I assume is like information technology], and you’re going to learn English, and Spanish, and French…”

That was the gist of a conversation that went on behind me recently while I was on a bus. A father was talking to his young son, who couldn’t have been more than five or six years old. It made me smile (and not just because I was excited that I could actually UNDERSTAND the conversation). In a city plagued by violence and poverty, it was so nice to hear words of hope for a change. They weren’t the words of an overbearing father already piling responsibilities on a son hardly old enough to read. Instead, they were simply the words of a loving father determined to do everything possible to see that his son would succeed in life. The way the words were woven together and the tone of the father’s voice made it almost seem like a fairy tale, except that in this case, the little boy really was going to have the opportunity to live happily ever after.

Like many things in Brazil, educational opportunities vary greatly between the rich and the poor. There is universal access to free education through government-sponsored schools, but unfortunately, those schools generally aren’t very good. Some are so overcrowded that the students have to be divided into three sections – those that attend school in the morning, those that go in the afternoon, and those that go at night. Drop-out rates are too high among poor students, especially since many from the favelas want nothing more than to grow up to be “bandidos” like their role models, and of course they don’t need school for that. Several years ago President Lula created a program called the Bolsa Família (Family Scholarship), which gives money to poor families under the condition that their children remain in school. Attendance rates have risen because of it, but there is still room for improvement. Even those students who make it all the way to graduation are often met with a nasty surprise should they try to apply to colleges. To get into a university in Brazil, applicants must pass that school’s Vestibular, which is somewhat like the ACT or SAT, except that every school has a different one. Just like public primary and secondary schools, public universities are also free, but unlike the lower levels of education, Brazilian public universities are the best of the best. They are, therefore, extremely hard to get into, and most public high schoolers haven’t been sufficiently prepared to be able to pass the Vestibulars of those schools. Private universities are easier to get into, but unless they are lucky enough to receive a scholarship, poor students are unable to afford the high costs of tuition. Education is one of the only ways someone poor in Brazil can improve their conditions, especially since almost all good jobs in Brazil require university degrees, even more so than in the United States. Unfortunately, the way the Brazilian system of education is set up makes good education extremely hard to attain for the poor sector of society.

The rich (including the middle class), on the other hand, have a much better chance. As demonstrated by the father on the bus, they value education highly, and most people who can afford it send their children to private school. Education is definitely a big investment, one that can start as early as kindergarten or pre-school. The usual criticism is that the ones who can afford private universities get into the free public ones, and the ones who can’t afford the private ones are left with those as their only option. This is true. However, to be fair, the students who get into the free public universities have often already been paying private school tuition for more than a decade, which must amount to a very sizable chunk of money. In a way, they’ve been paying for their “free” public university education all along.

In addition to regular private school, many students study foreign languages at private language schools. My twelve-year-old host brother, for example, is already studying French in regular school and English at a language school. Language schools are absolutely everywhere in Rio – it often seems as though I can’t walk five blocks without passing one. English is the most commonly-taught language, but French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Chinese are also often available. I think it’s really cool the way it’s so easy to learn a language here. In the US, there aren’t many options available for people to learn foreign languages in a classroom setting after college.