@Riggerjack: Well, Brazilians are promised a new major crisis every week—this is, after all, a country with a rate of over 60,000 homicides a year (in a period of
peace). Things are always just about to get worse somehow, but quantitatively rather than qualitatively—for example, our public hospitals
already lack beds, drugs and even doctors; so, what would "worse" look like?
More sick people crammed into hallways, laying on trolleys (or the floor)? Nothing new here.
Some things are easier to predict, however. Whatever happens, Brazilians
will have lots of fun; there
will be a lot of soccer and races to watch; it is said that a new year in Brazil does not really begin until after the carnival, which
will certainly be as bright and colourful as always; parties
will be held every weekend
and every holiday—and as a Catholic country, there is a good number of holidays to daydream about (and if one of them happens to fall on a Thursday, we will probably extend it to cover Friday as well).
If the government needs money, it will probably start enforcing some laws, with the consequent increase of fines, and the population will adapt—as always. Perhaps new laws will be deemed necessary—last year, for instance, the powers that be decided that every car had to carry a chemical fire extinguisher, and the drivers who did not comply would be fined; people were having trouble in
finding the contraption to buy, though, so the authorities went "never mind, then" on the matter.
My point is that Brazil is a rich country in many ways, so I believe that the problem is less about resources than management. If this new austerity program actually leads to a real change of attitude (for the government
and the people), coupled with a fierce battle against corruption, and, yes, a major and thorough revision of our taxation system, eventually we will find ourselves far better off with "less" than we are right now with "more."
@George the original one: I beg to differ. In a race to the bottom, education in Brazil has been a serious contender for the first place—highly competitive against health and security, though they both put up a very good fight. Sure, a lot is
nominally invested in the area, but our ubiquitous corruption schemes must be taken into account; moreover, pouring extra money into a scheme that is in itself faulty and based on wrong assumptions has surely not helped over the years—what Richard Feynman
wrote in 1985 about education in Brazil has remained a precise description up to this point.
Brazilian students have been consistently stuck to the last places in international exams (e.g. PISA), and research data has indicated that 68% of Brazilians are functional illiterates (IBOPE, 2005)—including 62% of our
university students (Instituto Paulo Montenegro and ONG Ação Educativa, 2012).
More Brazilians
are indeed finishing high school and (with sacrifices) even college, collecting degrees and all that, and if
this is what is being measured as "education," then your assessment is correct; otherwise, actual learning being the yardstick, Brazil has been in the dark for generations.
This
may be changing, however. The same new government that came up with the austerity program is planning and announcing a reformulation of the high school system, which is purported to:
- Increase its current schedule from 800 hours to 1,400 hours a year;
- Go from a part-time to a full-time period;
- Make some disciplines optional (they are all mandatory at the moment);
- Offer training in trades (the most promising point, I would say);
- Offer college credits for the completion of certain disciplines.
Supposing that the execution
will at least vaguely resemble the project—far from being a wise assumption here—there may be some interesting developments ahead. Nevertheless, that would account for the future; as for the past, the enlargement of Brazilian middle class had more to do with economic factors than with our racket of an "education" system—I cannot dedicate myself to the required research for supporting this assertion presently, however, so feel free to regard this as mere opinion.