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03.07.07
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Comparing Russia And Brazil: Education And Economic Growth
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By Michael Akerib
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Editor's Note:
In 2003, economists at the Goldman Sachs Research Institute introduced the idea of the BRIC – an acronym that refers collectively to Brazil, Russia, India and China. The economists at Goldman Sachs believed that these emerging markets, if properly managed, could dominate the world economy. Over the summer, Russia Profile is running a series of articles comparing Russia with its BRIC counterparts, focusing particularly on issues of population growth, education and adherence to Western business practice and guidelines. The series will be published in a special edition of Russia Profile magazine this fall.
When considering education in developing countries, two major issues need to be covered: Access to education and the quality of education received.
According to a UNICEF study, Brazil, which spends only 3.7 percent of GNP on education, has one of the worst education systems in Latin America. Up to 20 percent of adults are unable to read and write and only 40 percent have completed primary education. As a result, today only 60 million adults in Brazil have completed this very basic level of education.
Education is the responsibility of municipalities and states, with the disparity in quality reflecting the large gaps in wealth among the different Brazilian states. While the federal government has made a major effort to ensure access to primary education throughout the country and although officially school attendance is mandatory until the age of 14, there are still huge discrepancies with regards to the quality of education, with the Afro-Brazilian and native minorities being at a large disadvantage. A substantially lower percentage of Brazilians of African descent complete the eight years of mandatory primary education, and while the gap narrows at the secondary level, it is considerable at tertiary levels. These differences account for a considerable part of the disparity in income between these minorities and the rest of the population. These inequalities obviously have a major impact on the job market and reinforce discrimination.
Poor families need additional income and therefore put their children to work early, and regardless, they would be unable to afford books and other school material. Children from the lowest classes of society also often suffer from malnutrition, which affects their school performance. Additionally, five million children live in areas that completely lack secondary schools.
Where there are school systems in place, school buildings are generally derelict and the available books and teaching materials are often outdated, particularly in fast-evolving subjects such as science. As in many countries, salaries for teachers are so low that they need to have a second or even a third job to survive.
The middle and upper classes rely essentially on private education, which means state and local governments are less compelled to invest in public education because they are themselves less invested in it.
Admission to university is dependent on results of a universal exam, and there are 500,000 places in public universities available to the 2 million students who graduate from secondary schools each year.
The governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro established a plan relying on a large number of factors to improve education, including the building of larger schools in which students can attend classes all day. The first results show that this approach has significantly improved both exam results and attendance while decreasing drop-out rates.
Brazil’s president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, introduced two new programs to improve education. The first, Bolsa Escola, gives parents a monthly payment of 95 Reals ($49) to keep their children in elementary school. Forty six million people have benefited from this program as well as from the Fund for the Implementation and Development of Basic Education, through which municipalities receive federal government grants in proportion to the number of children attending school. While these programs led to a sharp increase in the number of pupils, the quality of education dropped considerably as facilities and teachers were overstretched. Its success has led to an expanded program called FUNDEB, which covers preschool and secondary school.
A group of NGOs backed by several corporations created a program entitled “Everyone for Education,” which aims to improve the dire situation of Brazilian education and allow industry to improve its manufacturing and administrative processes with the help of trained personnel. The end goal of these programs is to ensure that the next generation will be better educated and therefore make a larger contribution to economic growth, although it remains to be seen if these measures will be sufficient to allow Brazil to successfully face the challenges of the 21st century.
Although Russia’s education system is imperfect, its problems are distinctly different from those of Brazil.
The legacy of the Soviet system is still felt today, 15 years after the fall of communism. The Soviet system was characterized by strong centralization and overarching ideology. The main obstacle to lasting change in the Russian educational system has been the educators themselves who were, to a large extent, holdovers from the old system. Low salaries for teachers, particularly in rural areas, has meant that young people have stayed away from this profession as other opportunities that were not available under the communist regime opened up.
The ideological aspects strongly emphasized the role of a socialist society and required students to memorize a large amount of material. Needless to say, it discouraged highly individualized behavior and creativity, factors that are essential in today’s technologically-advanced world.
The 1992 law on education loosened state control over educational establishments, encouraged teachers to teach along non-ideological lines and suggested a link between education and the demands of the workplace, changes that would hopefully allow education to take its place as the engine of economic growth.
Nevertheless, the state did not invest heavily into the school system, and a large number of rural schools, which represent three quarters of the total number of schools, are in a rather primitive state with no running water or little if any central heating.
School is mandatory between the ages of seven and 15, and students failing a course after the age of 14 can be expelled by the school.
While education is free in state schools, private schools also exist. Foreign languages, especially English, are emphasized and the ratio of students to teachers is very low. Teachers are better paid in private than in public schools.
Russia’s literacy rate is close to 100 percent, with 60 percent of Russians having completed secondary school. There is, however, a large difference in the percentage of people completing secondary and higher education in urban areas compared with rural areas.
While in Brazil education widens the racial gap, some minority groups are also at a disadvantage in Russia since diplomas can only be awarded for education in Russian, Bashkir and Tatar.
In terms of institutions of higher education, Russia lacks both higher vocational institutions and outstanding business schools, although the number of the latter is now close to 1,000. Further, the payment of bribes is inevitable if a student wants to enter university. A UNESCO report estimates that $520 million in bribes was paid last year to professors or school administrators.
An interesting recent development is the creation of the Skolkovo Moscow School of Management that will train the business elite of tomorrow using a local and foreign faculty through a series of agreements with top foreign institutions. These agreements will hopefully give students the possibility of studying abroad at one of Skolkovo’s partner institutions. The school is scheduled to open in 2008, but some educational programs have already begun. Students will be drawn both from Russia and from other countries.
Graduates from this and other creative higher education programs should be able to foster innovation and productivity in the workplace, two elements lacking in Russian industry.
The Knowledge Society
The business environment today is driven by knowledge, and for development to take place, it is essential that the entire educational system, but particularly at the university level, is geared to lifelong education. This is the best way to increase productivity and compete in a global economy.
Higher education cannot limit itself to transmitting existing knowledge, but must, through research, extend the limits of knowledge and adapt it to local needs. This should contribute to diminishing, if not totally eliminating, the brain drain affecting the BRIC countries. It is also at the university level that teachers are trained who will make a major contribution to the development of the entire educational process, starting from the earliest school years.
In both Brazil and in Russia, development and economic growth will only occur if their educational systems can adapt and carry out the much needed transformation, in particular by bridging the technical divide between their still-developing economies and those that are increasingly technologically-based.
Michael Akerib is a Senior Consultant with Rusconsult and a professor at Sacred Heart University in Luxembourg. This is the second in a series of three articles comparing Russia with Brazil in the context of the BRIC framework. |
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