PUBLIC POLICIES FOR BRAZILIAN EDUCATION:Convergences in the Southern Cone and Latin America, Transformations and Quests at the turn of the century
Prof. Dr. Martha Abrahão Saad Lucchesi *
Catholic University of Santos, Santos – SP, Brazil.
Paper presented at the European Conference on Educational Research, University College Dublin, 7-10 September 2005
Introduction
Public policies for education have always been intrinsic to the model of nation pursued. In a quick flight through history, one finds indicative references such as the Greek polis, which provided its citizens with an Education that would enable them to maintain their status quo, as well as the policies of the French State, during Napoleon times, which intended to speed up a change toward factory production and technological modernity.
This study makes use of four kinds of documents: (1) Law texts to define the role of State, constitutional decisions within a representative state, to which people grant power and from which they expect public policies both coherent and consistent with higher Education, being aware of reflecting intentions and signaling tendencies; (2) newspaper and magazine news and articles which analyze the situation of higher Education in Brazil and documents form World Bank bringing prescriptions to privatize higher Education, which, in turn, contradict with the tendencies and challenges pointing at the consolidation of democratic learning and contributing to social inclusion, discussion and solution of great national issues; (3) official statistics whose data enable the qualitative and quantitative perception of gaps, flaws and imbalance between the higher Education scenario and data from the Ministries of Education in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Chile, as a comparative study in Latin America’s Southern Cone; (4) texts from the University Reform bringing proposals and intentions, both clear and hidden, which may either revert the process of rendering the university public or consolidate it. This analysis will take place in an interdisciplinary way since while respecting the statute of each science, it aims at generating a new thought, taking place at the threshold of Legal, Political and Educational Sciences.
Interdisciplinary studies take all specialists to recognize the limits of their knowledge to accept
Contributions from other disciplines. Thus, a
Science complements another one, and the
dissociation, the separation of sciences is replaced
by the convergence toward objectives in common.
(FAZENDA, 2003, p. 43)
* Ph.D and M.A in Education from the Catholic University of Sao Paulo and also a lawyer. Professor/ Researcher in the Masters in Education Program in the Catholic University of Santos/ State of Sao Paulo
The issue of public policies for Education configures itself as the very essence of what a people understands a State to be. This is the first epistemological issue of difficult definition (or better saying: ideological positioning) one aims at solving. Peroni (1998, p.1), in a study on the educational policy in the Brazilian State, in the 1990’s, affirms that:
The concept of State we apply (...) is the historical, concrete, class State, that is to say, the maximum State for capital since in the process of correlating powers under way, capital holds hegemony.
PERONI, 1998, p. 1)
Although the notion of State had existed since Ancient times, it was bound to both autonomous cities and great Empires.
Historically, the concept of national State, as currently understood, arose in Modern Ages, from the Commercial Revolution, and only came true and configured itself as such in the 19th. Century, with the expansion in Europe and the Americas of the political ideas brought by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, together with economic liberalism. Since then, the national State has detached from the figure of the king and started being regarded as an abstract concept applied to a set of concrete factors, as follows: the simultaneous existence of a people that holds and occupies a territory marked with sovereignty to govern itself.
The executive and legislative activities of the indi-vidual in a natural state would transfer to the society. This is, therefore, the base and the limit of governors’ political powers, that is, the process of creation of the social pact (public Ethos) and of the political power, regarded as transfer of the act of governing, by society’s grant, becomes the communal space constructed by this social pact. In this historical moment, the institutional and the historical traits of these times would have been produced by and for human beings. The whole historical origin of the Institution and Politics of any institution or social organization will be found in the State. Human existence in society preceded the historical production of modern State and its institutions for the construction, regulation and consolidation of the social pact.
(LOCKE, 1991, p. 225)
In this sense, Aith (2002, p. 1) affirms that the existence of the modern State is bound to the existence of a people living in a given territory and holding sovereign political power over both the territory and people.
Brazil is a constitutional State, as it bases itself on a Constitution, seen as a national pact on the laws and rules regulating how citizens of this State will live together. The constitutional State is also a modern concept which, while restricting the power of the ruler, depersonalizes this power, by definition granted by the people through voting.
According to Aith (2002, p. 2), the constitutional State is based on a written law, resulting from consensus, which limits the power of rulers. Power is representative since it is held by the people and performed by the rulers elected by society. This separation between power and its performance characterizes the Rule of Law, in which the rights of citizens are guaranteed by “a legal division of power, founded in the respect to legality (formal and material), and according to which rulers should act.
One understands that the Rule of Law ensures that no individual, be it the president or an ordinary citizen, is above the law. Democratic governments exhort authority through the law and are in turn subjected to this very same law.
For Gonçalves (2002, p. 1) the definitions of public policies conceive the State as a central agent of its promotion. As they are used to centralizing the promotion of the State, they configure themselves as governments’ policies, in the sense that a change in government generally leads to changes in public policies. In reality, political campaigns tend to be grounded above all on the promise of adopting certain policies to the detriment of others, maintaining things the way they are, or rather, changing things both partially or totally. According to this premise, policies for Education or the higher Education subsystem shall be performed as State public policies. Therefore, they must not be either guided by timed policies or incorporated by the movement of political and economic privatization taking place since 1990; in fact, this movement reconfigures itself on the onset of the 21st century although apparently discussed in a democratic way with society, as compensatory neoliberal public policies.
Rodrigues (1999, p. 4) approaches the issue of “the relationships between the intergovernmental organizations’ policies and the States’ internal businesses, including public policies.” In other words, one may affirm that the autonomy of the State (preliminary condition for a State to be considered as such) undergoes practical limitations posed by the influence of international organizations. According to the author, these appear both due to “the progressive adherence to rules and policies negotiated and agreed upon within the Intergovernmental Organizations (IGO’s), and “the acceptance of interference modalities, in several degrees, exhorted by some IGO’s,” resulting from the new international scenarios, including the new issue of international relations.”[1]
Public Policies for Education: the Brazilian experience
In the 1970’s mainly after the Oil Crisis in 1973, one started to question the State model of Social Welfare, in which the worker’s income was complemented by social security, including health assistance, education and housing.
This model appeared after the capitalist State took over the role of controlling, or at least softening, the economic cycles in the aftermath of the 2nd World War. This model is also known as Fordism due to the fact it held industrial production and mass production and consumption as its main core. From the late 1960’s on, mainly after 1973, Fordism underwent crisis, when the explosion of public debts, due to the oil crisis, made the limitations of the system growth clear.
New models for the administration of the capitalist enterprise started arising, known as flexible administrations (Harvey, 1989), characterized by changes in work administration within the capitalist enterprise. Meanwhile, the model of Social Welfare State started being questioned for its costs. Thus, ideas such as “minimum State” and “service privatization” have started to predominate, together with the growth of structural unemployment and the precariousness of work relations. Peroni (1998, p. 3) points out that the reduction of the presence of the State refers exclusively to the worker’s social welfare and legal protection. This political and economic thought has become known as “neoliberalism”.
In the meantime, one has verified the growth of financial profit over productive profit and the globalization of speculative investment facilitated by innovations in communications. In each country the intervention of the State will depend on the conditions of reproduction of these relations besides the conditions of productive accumulation. According to Peroni (1998),
The history of Brazil is marked by the power of patrimony, taken from the public to benefit the private sector, by patronage and reconciling pacts among dominant classes. It was thus in the transition from dictatorship to democracy, when the same practices continued taking place and privileging dominant classes.
In the 1990’s Brazil characterized itself by adhering to the idea of reducing the role of the State, which was not only the controller and economy stabilizer, by also its “fuel”, on account of the fact that it invested with the objective of accelerating the country’s economic and technological development.
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who took office in a period of the State indebtedness, worsened by the capital’s high costs, proposed a reform in the Brazilian State, by means of public services’ privatization, especially in higher Education.
To do so, the Ministry of Administration and State Reform (MASR) was conceived and presented the guidelines for State Reform (1995), according to which such a reform “should be understood in the context of redefinition of the State’s role, which would no longer be directly responsible for the economic and social development, thus strengthening its function of promoting and regulating this development” (Peroni, 1998, p. 5)
On the issue of privatization, it is noteworthy mentioning that, according to Gentile (2004), it means in general terms:
“Delegating public responsibilities to private entities. Even if an immediate consequence of privatization is the reduction of the government’s role related to educational-service rendering, with the related increase of private supply in this field, the dynamics of delegation of public responsibilities needs the State which immediately strengthens it. Thus, what is at stake is not the reduction of State action, but rather its reconfiguration.” (Gentile, 2004, p. 1)[2]
Also in the case of Brazilian educational policy, predominant in the 1990’s, the reduction of services rendered to the citizen by the State was intended. Another aspect of the same period was “to decentralize responsibilities”, i.e., several basic public services, such as health and education, were passed over to the municipalities. This transfer of responsibilities was not followed by resource decentralization. On the contrary, when substituting several “contributions” for taxes, the federal government freed itself from sharing resources belonging to the States and municipalities. The condition of indebtedness and insolvency of the States and municipalities worsened through the years, limited the intended autonomy that “decentralization” had proposed.
Hence, it may be said that privatization and responsibility transfer were conceived as guidelines in the Brazilian public policy agendas in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, including in relation to public policies for education.
In this case, there was strong interference from World Bank, which created a “recipe” for higher Education privatization and basic learning popularization in the region. This unique model, which based itself on the statistic mean of educational problems in underdeveloped countries, included, across the board, African, Latin-American and Asian countries, without taking their particulars into account.
The adherence to the model varied from country to country, thus leading to variations in results obtained, since it had as a premise very different national situations, including those related to educational rates.
World Bank’s Guidelines for Latin America
In 1994 the model recommended by World Bank pointed at the premise converging with the government’s policy:
· To foster a higher institutional differentiation, including the establishment of private institutions.
· To provide incentives for public institutions to diversify financing sources, among which students’ participation in expenses and the close binding between fiscal financing and results.
· To redefine governmental function in higher Education.
· To adopt policies seriously aiming at granting priority to quality and equity objectives.
· The Federal Government may follow the “recommendation” of World Bank to cut down on investments in higher Education, under the allegation of the existence of a public higher Education for an elite and the lack of State resources.
· The elimination of subsidizing not related to instruction, adoption (or increase) of enrollment rights, achievement of donations and the performance of activities generating entrance fees are recommended by World Bank.
In these terms, students with a good financial situation would have to cover 25% to 30% of learning costs. The others would be granted student loans paid off after graduation. (World Bank, 1994). The interference of World Bank (linked with pressures from the International Monetary Fund –IMF) over public policies in underdeveloped countries is mentioned by Canadian economist Michel Chossudovsky, a critic of IMF’s and World Bank’s pressure (“Bretton Woods Institutions”) over indebted countries, obliging respective countries to follow guidelines from the Policy Framework Paper (Chossudovsky, 1995 apud Gonçalves, 2002, p. 13)
Apparently a document produced by autonomous governments, in reality this set of principles and goals seems to have been made under rigorous supervision of IMF and World Bank, following a pre-established pattern. (Ferrer, 1999 apud Gonçalves, 2002, p. 11)