By MARCIO DOS SANTOS*
Through EFAPE, a teacher training school, well-intentioned but unprepared trainers offer advanced training courses to even more unprepared teachers
Imagine the following situation: you go to a general practitioner, do some tests, and realize that you have a serious heart problem and that you need to see a cardiologist urgently. Imagine that doctors in São Paulo, just like our teachers in the state school system, are specialists, but they sometimes interfere in things that they don't understand.
The profession of doctor, like that of teacher, requires ongoing training, which in the case of us teachers is offered remotely by EFAPE. The doctor specialized in psychiatry, but took a distance learning course at a training school for doctors, and now he is “qualified” to take care of your heart and even perform heart surgeries if necessary. This specialty was achieved with “hard effort” through distance learning.
Now comes my question: Would you trust the health of your heart to a psychiatrist who graduated in cardiology remotely? If your answer is yes, your head needs more attention than your heart, believe me.
This pathetic and farcical scenario is a real one that we find in the public education system in São Paulo. Through EFAPE, a teacher training school, well-intentioned but unprepared teachers offer refresher courses to even more unprepared teachers. The situation of public education in São Paulo is disastrous. It is still a great challenge, not only for schools in São Paulo, but for the entire country, to solve their problems and improve their numbers, especially in subjects such as Portuguese and mathematics. However, other subjects, if also evaluated, showed the same problems, if not greater.
On the Inep website, we found information that schools in Alagoas, Ceará, and Pernambuco achieved a score of 10 in the Ideb in 2023. On the same page, we have access to the report by Minister Camilo Santana, which is very enlightening regarding the current situation of our schools: “I am very happy to welcome here the 21 schools that scored 10 in the Ideb, which are all from the Brazilian Northeast, from Alagoas, Pernambuco, and Ceará, but we want all states in Brazil to also have schools that score 10. This is an effort by all of us and for which we are working”, highlighted the Minister.
Given this scenario, the question remains: What have these schools done? Why have they succeeded where others have failed? The minister continued by saying that “when he took over the Ministry of Education, he prioritized programs and actions focused on basic education, because Brazil’s investment per student in higher education is on par with what is invested by developed countries, while in basic education, the investment is one third of what developed countries invest.”
Here in São Paulo, our governor Tarcísio de Freitas got involved in a flashy debate about redirecting part of the resources from education to health, as reported on the magazine's website capital letter, “Tarcísio's PEC that could withdraw almost R$10 billion from Education goes to vote in Alesp” The news published on 05/11/2024 continues with the following information; “The proposal seeks to reduce investments in the area from 30% to 25%, redirecting funds to Health”.
The Federal Constitution “in its article 212, establishes that the Union will apply, annually, never less than 18, and the states, the Federal District (DF) and the municipalities 25%, at least, of the net tax revenue (RLI) in the maintenance and development of education (MDE) (BRAZIL, 1988)” according to a dossier published by José Marcelino de Rezende Pinto, professor at FFCL University of São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto campus. The dossier, among other issues, analyzes the structure of education financing provided for in the federal constitution.
In its final considerations, the dossier points to the problems involving the EC/no. 95 of 2016 which in practice limited public spending on education, keeping it at 5% of our GDP. On the website Gazeta do Povo, in an article dated September 10, 2024, we observed that Brazil reduced spending on education, with the exception of early childhood education. It is worrying to observe what we invest in education per student in secondary education, 3.181 dollars against 5.139 dollars in Costa Rica, still far from the top positions of these countries such as Luxembourg: 26.357 dollars and Switzerland 19.448 dollars per student as we see on the portal The globe of 10/09/2024. Not to mention that the State of São Paulo includes the retirement of inactive workers as “investments” in education, which, according to the constitution, is counterproductive.
I have been seeing significant improvements in the equipment we use in schools for over ten years now, but that doesn't mean that this money and equipment really make any difference in the quality of student learning. In recent years, we have seen the platformization of education that began in the state of Paraná, when Renato Feder was its education secretary and moved to São Paulo, bringing the same mentality.
The Alura platform alone cost the public coffers 30 million reais and the process took place without bidding and also without transparency in a newspaper report Folha de S. Paul. There is still a lack of studies that prove that all this “technological paraphernalia” really makes that much of a difference in teaching. In the meantime, the Journal of USP in 2019 gave us the news that Brazil was the last country in the ranking of the countries that value their professionals in education out of a total of 35 countries evaluated and that 91% of the population believes that teachers are not respected in the classroom.
Returning to the initial question of the text; would you respect a professional who graduated remotely and performs a function for which he or she is not prepared? I hear many colleagues defending this position, saying that we teachers are the ones who have to prepare ourselves, which is what we have already done with our training, that is my opinion. However, if I graduated in history, I do not intend to teach geography or sociology, in the same way that a general practitioner will never be able to go around giving reports on psychiatric cases.
Let us remember that the distance learning craze started with us teachers, who saw no problem in completing a second degree in six months, remotely and at an affordable price. Today, education in the city of São Paulo, with its “absence” of a career plan, ends up attracting the worst professionals to its ranks. We teachers are the first to depreciate our work.
When high school reform was first considered, the fallacy was that the curriculum was exhaustive and made no sense to students. We are increasingly prioritizing technical education that, in practice, is also not preparing students for the world of work. History, geography, philosophy and sociology classes have been losing ground in the curriculum, which leads me to ask another question: what is the problem with these subjects? Why does every government, when it wants to impose its ideology on the masses – regardless of what it is – start by changing the school curriculum, and always end up focusing on the humanities, which are focused on human issues and focus on human issues, as was the case when history classes were replaced by moral and civic education during the civil-military dictatorship?
I hear from some fellow administrators that we still have a 19th century school in the 21st century. Children did not learn engineering in early childhood in England because of the advances of the Industrial Revolution. Besides, what is the problem with 19th century education that produced people of the caliber of Einstein, Freud and Darwin? A quick look at the way in which third-year high school students at the elite Bandeirantes school are educated gives us a slight impression and at the same time, dispels all doubts about the inequalities in education between students who are children of the elite and students who are children of the working class.
In our classrooms, in public schools, we see a generation of people who are more concerned with answering the call than with consistently studying to prepare them for college entrance exams or other competitive exams. I am not making a direct criticism of the program here, I just think that the program should be linked to performance and not to the student's attendance in the classroom.
I believe that a package with well-prepared and well-paid professionals, relevant pedagogical proposals that prepare students to exercise citizenship and work, as provided for in the LDB (Law of Guidelines and Bases of Education), infrastructure that allows students to trust their future to the school, and a deeper vision of our social reality, especially in schools on the outskirts, would be a much more effective package to improve the rates at which we have only been struggling in recent years.
As for good professionals, we will only have them by offering good opportunities. Teachers today are forced to combine teaching in the municipal network, which at least in the case of the city of São Paulo is more attractive than the state network, and in private or state schools in order to make ends meet at the end of the month.
When can these professionals who work more than twelve hours a day prepare themselves? How will students be inspired by their studies as a possibility for changing their lives, when their own teachers are undervalued by themselves, their families and by governments that still believe that training a technician, a child of the working class, is more interesting than training a scientist?
Regarding this, one last observation: we have been talking a lot about historical and scientific denialism in Brazil and around the world in recent years. This view of technical education to the detriment of scientific education in Brazil leads me to believe that, in our country, scientific denialism begins in school.
*Marcio dos Santos is a History professor at the São Paulo Department of Education.
References
PINTO, José Marcelino de Rezende. Dossier. Education financing in the 1988 federal constitution: 30 years of social mobilization. Education & society. Campinas, v 39, 145, p. 846-869, Oct-Dec, 2018.
https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/constituicao/emendas/emc/emc95.htm
https://jornal.usp.br/radio-usp/brasil-esta-em-ultimo-lugar-na-valorizacao-dos-professores/ https://colband.net.br/ensino-medio/preparatorio-processos-seletivos/
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