The importance of education
Fabio Giambiagi
Valor Econômico, 08/24/2009
We just published the book Basic Education in Brazil (Campus / Elsevier), with 12 chapters, including a Nobel Prize in Economics in 2000, Professor James Heckman, who honored us with the co-author of an article written with great teachers Araujo Cunha and Moura. As I was only one of four organizers and the merits of the book fit to authors who have written excellent chapters, feel free to compliment the content. I think that those interested can read the pages in a diagnosis and a screenplay about the challenges faced by the Brazilian education. The major contribution of the book is to show what is being done in new and beginning to reveal the first results in this area in Brazil and worldwide. Chapters such as Fernandes, Gremaud, highlighting the role of evaluation and improvement of indicators; de Menezes-Filho and Ribeiro on the determinants of improved academic performance; M. Neri about how education is perceived by the population, and C . Ferraz about the experiences of SP and EP, with the adoption of performance incentives in the remuneration of teachers, without prejudice to other chapters that do not no space to summarize, point to promising avenues for future occurrence of new advances in the field. As in many other areas in Brazil, there were improvements, but there is an arduous task ahead.
The importance of education can be measured by data from one of the chapters, written by C. Moura Castro. In it, shows that in Brazil, individuals with primary education earn around 2 times what he earns an individual with no schooling, those who have completed high school receive a third (third) more than those who only have fundamental, and graduates with higher education have incomes equal to more than 3.5 times that of those with only high school. Study is therefore important for the country and for individuals, therefore, in general, the higher education are associated with higher levels of income and welfare.
Brazil is delayed, historically, relative to other countries or had already done its homework in this area long ago - like the U.S. - or is intensely devoted to education in recent decades - especially in some Asian countries. F. Barbosa Filho and S. People showed that at the beginning of the current decade, the average number of schooling of the economically active population of English-speaking countries, especially the U.S., was twice that Brazil.
The table, drawn in the first chapter of the book, authored by Professor F Veloso, supplements this information by decomposing the given percentage of the population aged 25 and older with high school. Despite advances in recent years, Brazil ranks poorly in the photo. In the whole population, the indicator is already compelling: while only 30% of the adult population has completed high school in Brazil, the percentage reaches levels of 80% to 90% in Germany or the USA. Yet it is in progress over time most noticeable on our delay, when comparing the percentage of those who completed high school between groups specific population. One measure is to compare this indicator for two age groups: the 25-34 years and 55-64 years. That indicates the degree of education of youth, while the latter shows a photograph of the young group that was three decades before. It's a way to measure the progress of a country and between generations. Look at what happened with Spain: the group of 55 to 64 years, only 27% have completed high school, but among the younger, the percentage reaches 64%. No wonder that Spain is only a pale reminder of the country 70 years. In Chile - which has experienced great progress in the last 30 years - these percentages are 32% and 64% respectively. And what is most striking: not only the elderly in South Korea have similar levels of education to young people in Brazil today, but - astonishingly - the percentage of youngsters who have completed high school in Korea reached incredible 97%.
Fabiana de Felicio presents other data to compose the picture: the completion rate for primary education to 16 years old in Brazil was 61% in 2007, which is little. On the other hand, was only 34% in 1997. At the same time, average schooling for persons aged 15 and over was 7 years in 2007, which also is unusual, that this information, however, comes with two good news: The first is that there was a significant improvement since the number of years of study of this group was 5 in 1987 and the second is that the range of 15 to 30 years had reached nine years of study in 2007.
The framework generally portrayed in the various chapters - that we can not expose in detail, but it may be better understood by reading the book - progress is slow but gradual, accentuated in the last 15 years. If the effort devoted to the theme - administrations of merit shared by Paulo Renato de Souza Cardoso under and Fernando Haddad in Lula's government - is maintained, Brazil in a few decades could be better than the country in which we played live. We can only hope that there continuing this progress and, preferably, they will accelerate in the next decade.
Fabio Giambiagi is an economist, writes monthly on Monday.
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