By JOSÉ CASTILHO MARQUES NETO*
New research “Portraits of reading” shows that Brazil lost 6,7 million in the period 2020-2023
It has been 396 years since the first publication of From Motu Cordis by the revolutionary English physician William Harvey. Contradicting the traditional medicine that prevailed in the 17th century, William Harvey challenged the concepts of Claudius Galen and demonstrated the functioning of the circulatory system and the movement of blood through blood vessels. In addition to his medical discovery, his scientific studies inspired some modern thinkers such as René Descartes.
Therefore, for almost four centuries, medicine has known what the word hemorrhage means. It is explained in dictionaries very clearly, as in this summary: “Hemorrhage is the loss of blood that occurs when blood vessels rupture. The severity of the hemorrhage is determined by the large amount and speed with which blood is lost. The hemorrhage can be internal or external.”.
When severe, persistent, and uninterrupted, it can lead to death, and if the blood loss is gradual, it can cause fatigue and shortness of breath. As we know, blood and its circulation established by cardiac movements, pioneered by William Harvey, are essential to the lives of humans and many other beings in nature.
It was inevitable to associate my analysis of the results of the sixth edition of the survey Portraits of Reading in Brazil with a large and deep hemorrhage of the human, social and development rights of the Brazilian people.
I am one of the analysts at Portraits of Reading 6, released on November 19th, coordinated by the Instituto Pró-Livro/IPL and the Itaú Foundation, and available on the website https://www.prolivro.org.br/. And I am a veteran, because I have participated in the analysis of the research since the second edition, carried out in 2007, always focusing on public policies and their relationship with the increase and decrease in the number of readers in Brazil.
Even with this accumulated experience, and with the temperance that characterizes my personal and professional life, the deepest feeling I had, as well as my fellow analysts, was of indignation. Like a serious hemorrhage of a tragedy that comes as no surprise to the observer of national politics, the country lost, from 2016 onwards, millions of readers after obtaining the number of 16,5 million new readers revealed by the same Portraits in its fourth edition of 2015.
This is not the first time that we have been outraged by the evidence in the survey of the loss of readers. In the fifth edition, in 2019, we already felt this bitter taste in our mouths, in the sad perspective that we were being pushed into civilizational obscurity despite the efforts of activists. The year 2019 showed the loss of 4 million readers, reflecting the interruption of public policies around the National Book and Reading Plan/PNLL.
The beginning of this negative cycle was the crisis that paralyzed the last year of President Dilma Rousseff, the disastrous presidency of Michel Temer and the first year of the unspeakable one who governed us from 2019 to 2022. I wrote about this loss in volume 5 of the book Portraits which can be read on the IPL website.
The current outrage also led me to think about William Harvey and his time, Modernity and its scientific and social advances. That time meant for humanity the creation of the Modern State, which broke with the idea of the Theocratic State of the Middle Ages. It brought about the possibility of better recognition of rights, the expansion of science and the arts, the emergence of the press and the first achievements so that writing and reading could break down barriers and expand beyond the privileged readers – the men of the church, the nobles, and the ruling elite.
Since Gutenberg, one of the exponents of modernity, the mass production of books and their increasingly widespread circulation has become a fundamental instrument for literary reading, the construction of citizenship and the uninterrupted creation of knowledge.
As I have discussed in this space many times, the literary movement that produces and consumes knowledge, poetry and literature has always been a danger for centuries to the ruling elites in their various guises. We know, to cite just the last century, of the book bonfires and the persecution and murder of writers and scientists in totalitarian periods, particularly during Nazism.
In today's Brazil, where an authoritarian, sexist, racist and violent society persists, we see how the last two governments understood that, contrary to public policies to encourage, stimulate and support the formation of readers, the best way to cause social regression, promote ignorance and disrespect the right to read and write would be to provoke the hemorrhage of the advances achieved in the short period that the first PNLL symbolized between 2006-2015.
By joining federal efforts from the Ministries of Culture and Education, public and private institutions, several States and Municipalities and all the people of books and reading, the addition of 16,5 million new readers in Portraits of 2015 was not a miraculous result and did not have a single cause, but was something produced by the set of these efforts supported directly or indirectly by an aggregating public policy and with objective axes of action, involving State and Society, Education and Culture.
To support these comments, I share some data from Portraits of Reading 6.
All results from this period from 2020 to 2023 are negative. Instead of growing, Brazil has decreased. If in 2019 there was a loss of 4,6 million readers, the period 2020-2023 shows a loss of 6,7 million. If we want to make a comparative exercise and isolate the number of new readers shown in 2015, 16,5 million, we will subtract 11,3 million readers from this number.
The numbers are clear, within the methodology of Portraits and in the established concept of what is considered a reader and non-reader:
(i) From 2011 to 2015, we went from 50% of readers in relation to the Brazilian population to 56%, resulting in an increase of 16,5 million people (88,2 million in 2011 to 104,7 million in 2015); (ii) from 2015 to 2019, the 56% of 2015 fell to 52%, or a decrease of 4,6 million readers in 2019 (from 104,7 to 100,1 million); (iii) from 2019 to 2024, the 52% of 2019 fell to 47%, or a new decrease of 6,7 million in 2024 (from 100,1 to 93,4 million).
Other data, among many, are equally worrying:
(a) Sharp decline in reading among elementary school students, a crucial period for literacy and the development of a taste for reading and writing: in 2019, the percentage of readers in this segment was 49%, or 21,1 million student readers; in 2024, the rate fell to 40% or 13,7 million.
(b) Drop in the number of readers in the 5-10 age group, which is also fundamental for the development of readers: from 71% in 2019 to 62% in 2024, a loss of 9 percentage points. In the same age group, non-readers fell from 29% to 38%.
(c) Drop in readers in all regions of the country, with the exception of the Center-West, which grew 1 percentage point. The North lost 15 percentage points, the Northeast, Southeast and South, 5 percentage points each.
This sample of outrageous results is multiplied in the other items of the research and are warning signs to avoid a greater disaster in the next four years that will be reflected in Portraits 7 of 2028.
And why are we outraged by what these numbers reveal to us, the result of Bolsonaro's mismanagement? Because public reading policy is fundamental to democracy, as defined by Marilena Chauí:
“[…] in a democracy, something that characterizes political life is the creation of rights, the guarantee of rights, the preservation of rights and the capacity to promote new rights in such a way that power is social and it is this social power that is expressed in political decision-making. Therefore, the politics that are carried out depends on the quality of the society in which we live. Because politics will express whether we are in a conservative society, a democratic society, an authoritarian society, a violent society.”. (Interview TV Brazil, in 11/2024).
*José Castilho Marques Neto, He is a retired professor of philosophy at FCL-Unesp. He was president of Editora Unesp and the Mário de Andrade Library and Executive Secretary of the PNLL (MinC and MEC). Author, among other books, of Revolutionary loneliness: Mário Pedrosa and the origins of Trotskyism in Brazil (WMF). [https://amzn.to/3XNwXEi]
Originally published in the newspaper Draft.
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