Fernando Alcoforado *
Brazilian education is going through an unprecedented crisis. This crisis results, on the one hand, from the lack of an efficient and effective education system and, on the other, from the lack of governmental policies that contribute to overcoming the current problems of education and to their adaptation to the ongoing technological changes that impact on the world of work and society in general. The fact that Brazil’s education system is inefficient and ineffective prevents it from operating as a factor of economic and social development and contributes to the social ascent of the lower classes of the population. The lack of a new education policy adjusted to the current technological changes prevents Brazil from increasing the productivity of its workers and jeopardizing their economic and social development.
The inefficiency and ineffectiveness of the current education system are demonstrated by the mediocre performance of Brazilian students in the PISA (International Student Assessment Program) examinations that aim to measure the knowledge and ability in reading, mathematics and science of 15-year-old students both from industrialized OECD member countries and from partner countries, and by the unsatisfactory performance of Brazilian universities in the ranking of universities in the world measured by The Times Higher Education that evaluates the performance of university students and academic production in the areas of engineering and technology, arts and humanities, life sciences, health, physics and social sciences, and also considers research, transfer of knowledge and international perspective, as well as the teaching environment.
The catastrophic situation in which the education system in Brazil is, demonstrated by PISA and THE, and the ongoing technological changes that impact on the world of work and society in general are demanding a real revolution in education in Brazil. The great challenge of education in Brazil is represented not only by the deficiency of the current system but, above all, by the rapid changes that are occurring in the world of work thanks to the technological advance, mainly due to the impact of artificial intelligence, which is intelligence similar to the human displayed by mechanisms or software. Experts believe that the intelligence of machines will match that of humans by 2050, thanks to a new era in their ability to learn. This means that we are creating machines that can teach themselves and also communicate by simulating human speech.
There is every reason to believe that robots should be widely used in productive activity in general, which makes it imperative to prepare human beings to deal with these intelligent machines in the labor market. Considering that one of the objectives of a country’s education system is to plan the preparation and recycling of people for the labor market, it is incumbent upon the planners of Brazil’s education systems to identify the role of human beings in the world of work in a future with intelligent machines to carry out a wide-ranging revolution in teaching at all levels, including the qualification of teachers and the structuring of teaching units to prepare their students for a world of work where people will have to deal with intelligent machines. Educational units at all levels of education must be deeply restructured to achieve these goals.
In order to implement a new education system geared to the preparation of human beings for the labor market, it is essential, therefore, to begin to identify the human skills necessary for the work of the 21st century and to adjust the educational system in Brazil that is obsolete to form citizens more capable to a reality different from the industrial era that is coming to an end and still prevails at the moment.
The education system aims to prepare people, not only for the job market, but also for life. Contemporary education needs to provide the conditions for students to acquire the knowledge they need to think and build a better world. Students need to be made aware of what is happening in the fields of economics, science and technology, the environment and international relations, among others. There is enormous misinformation that reaches the overwhelming majority of students in Brazil, causing them to be unable to correctly interpret the reality in which they live, much less transform it. The present educational system contributes enormously to the alienation of human beings because education is not thought of as cultivation of the spirit as a condition for the advancement of humanity. This is what should be the true meaning of education.
In order to prepare the education system for life, the guidelines proposed by Edgar Morin in his book The Seven Necessities for Education in the Future should be adopted, which indicates the need for a transdisciplinary effort capable of rejoining the sciences and humanities and breaking with the opposition between nature and culture which, according to him, is a challenge for all those who are committed to rethinking the course of educational institutions and do not want to succumb to the inertia of fragmentation and excessive disciplinary characteristics of the contemporary era. Morin defends the thesis that we need to re-learn to rejoin the part and the whole, the text and the context, the global and the planetary, and face the paradoxes that the technical and economic development brought with it.
To make a revolution in Brazil’s education system, it is necessary to prepare the teacher to fulfill a new role. The role of the teacher is decisive so that through education a new type of man qualified for the world of work is created and conscious and well prepared to transform the world in which we live for his benefit. The role of the teacher should be that of a manager of processes rich in meaningful learning and not that of simply sending information in the classroom. The teacher should act as mediator of the students’ learning process using simple technologies, such as those on the cell phone, a camera to illustrate, a free program to gather the images and to count on them interesting stories and the students being authors, protagonists of their process of learning. We should be inspired by the educational policies practiced in Japan, Finland, South Korea and Switzerland, which are the most advanced countries in education in the world, in order to restructure Brazil’s education system from pre-school to higher education.
* Fernando Alcoforado, 78, holder of the CONFEA / CREA System Medal of Merit, member of the Bahia Academy of Education, engineer and doctor in Territorial Planning and Regional Development by the University of Barcelona, university professor and consultant in the areas of strategic planning, business planning, regional planning and planning of energy systems, is the author of 14 books addressing issues such as Globalization and Development, Brazilian Economy, Global Warming and Climate Change, The Factors that Condition Economic and Social Development, Energy in the world and The Great Scientific, Economic, and Social Revolutions that Changed the World.
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