by other factors, a childless girl was eight times more likely to be enrolled at school than a young mother with at least one child (Klaveren et al., 2009). The findings of Cardoso and Verner (2006) confirm that early parenthood has a strong impact driving teenagers out of school; they stress that extreme poverty is also lowering school attendance and that reducing the costs of school, such as transportation, could improve the record of school attendance.
In addition, students must pass the vestibular, a public open entrance examination; competition is fierce for places in public universities, since education in these universities is totally free of charge. Female participation in regular tertiary education continued to exceed male participation by far. In 2007, 68% of all students enrolled in tertiary education were women, bringing the women to men parity in tertiary-level enrolment to 206% (Klaveren et al., 2009, n. 24). In the population aged 20–29, in 2006, 21% were still being educated. Among the population aged 30 and over, relatively many were — either full time or part time — enrolled in public and private institutions. This called for a serious introspection and suitable action on the part of the federal government in Brazil.
Despite the enormous reforms made in the education sector, women continue to remain marginalized and discriminated in Brazil, especially those who are of Afro-descent or indigenous. The next section focuses on female education, discrimination, and the visible success of the social reform programs such as the PBF in approaching multiple issues of gender, education, income, and equity.
Female Education in Brazil: A Synoptic Overview
The Brazilian colonial economy, founded on large rural properties and slave labor, paid little attention to formal education for men and none whatsoever for women. Isolation, social stratification, and patriarchal family relations favored a power structure based on the limitless authority of landowners. According to Ribeiro (2000), the Iberian cultural tradition, transposed from Portugal to its Brazilian colony, considered women as inferior beings who had no need to learn to read and write. The educational work of the Jesuits significantly contributed to strengthening male predominance; its priests had a liking for dogmatic forms of thinking and preached the maximum authority of Church and state (Heime, 1975).
With the arrival of the Portuguese royal family in Brazil and Independence in 1822, Brazilian society began to have a more complex structure. International immigration and economic diversification increased the demand for education, which started being seen as an instrument for rising socially through the intermediary social strata (Beltrao and Diniz Alves, 2009). In this new context, the country’s leaders voiced their concern with female education for the very first time. The Empire’s first legislators established that primary school education should be the responsibility of the state and open to girls, who were primarily schooled by female teachers. But due to a lack of qualified female teachers and lack of interest in the parents, education did not reach a significant percentage of female students (UNICEF, 1982).
In the first part of the 19th century, the first institutions aimed at educating women began to appear, although in a dual teaching picture, with clear gender specializations. Generally speaking, primary education, with its strong moral and social content aimed at strengthening the role of the woman as wife and mother, was meant only for females. Female high school education was largely restricted to teacher training, or in other words, preparing female teachers for the primary school courses. Women were still excluded from higher levels of education during the 19th century. The first school was set up in Niterói, in 1835, followed by another in Bahia, in 1836. Until the final years of the empire, normal schools were few in number and almost insignificant in terms of student enrolment (Hahner, 1981).
If females found it difficult to have access to elementary education, the situation was more dramatic when it came to higher education, which was completely and unmitigatedly male dominated. Women were excluded from the first courses in medicine, engineering, and law that sprang up in the country. The imperial decree that gave women the right to enroll in a university course dates back to 1881. However, it was difficult to overcome these barriers because high school studies were essentially male-oriented, in addition to being expensive, and normal courses did not qualify women for entry to universities. It is important to note that during the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century female exclusion from high school courses made it unfeasible for women to enter university. So, duality and gender segmentation were present in the Brazilian educational system since the beginning, with women having lower literacy rates and restricted access to higher levels of education (Romanelli, 2001).
The Brazilian Constitution of 1891 sanctioned the decentralization of education into a dualist scheme: the federal government was responsible for creating and controlling higher and secondary school educational institutions and the states were responsible for setting up schools and monitoring and controlling elementary education, as well as high-school-level professional education. It included normal schools for girls and technical schools for boys (Beltrao and Diniz Alves, 2009, n. 34). While the educational system expanded quantitatively at this time, there was little by way of qualitative change.
The literacy rate of the Brazilian population grew during the Old Republic (1889–1930), despite the continuing high levels of illiteracy. Educational exclusion was obviously always greater for Afro-Brazilians (Beltrão and Novellino, 2002). The enrolment rates of Brazilian women in secondary and higher education increased at the beginning of the 20th century, but by much less so than those of men. For instance, between 1907 and 1912 in the Federal District, female presence in high school courses corresponded to less than a quarter of all students and in university courses it did not reach 1.5% (see Table 1). It is worth remembering that Rio de Janeiro had one of the best rates of education in the country (Beltrao and Diniz Alves, 2009, n. 34).
Table 1:Number of people enrolled in high schools and universities in the Federal District — 1907–1912.
Source: Statistics of the 20th century, IBGE (2003).
The reasons why the level of Brazilian investment in education was low owes its origins in the primary products export-driven economic model that had been based on slavery. While the population remained in the countryside, with its archaic means of production, schools exercised no important role in qualifying human resources, being merely an agent for educating people on how to enjoy their leisure time or for preparing for self-employed professional careers, in the case of men, or for being primary school teachers or housewives, in the case of women (Beltrao and Diniz Alves, 2009).
By redirecting Brazilian development toward the domestic market and to the urban, industrial sector, the Revolution of 1930 led to the first public policies for the masses, especially for those who lived in urban areas. The new demands made by industrialization and urban services had an influence on the content and expansion of education. But, as the expansion of capitalism was not homogenous all over Brazil, most of the expansion demanding for schools occurred in regions where capitalist relations were more advanced (Beltrao and Diniz Alves, 2009).
During the period of the so-called Populist Pact (1945–1964), despite popular pressure for the democratization of education, the ‘aristocratic’ character of schools was maintained with the agreement of the ruling elite, making the expansion of schools occur in a manner that was unplanned and inadequately financed. It is important to point out that only in 1961, with the Guidelines and Bases of Brazilian Education Law (LDB) (Beltrao and Diniz Alves, 2009), was the equivalence of all high school courses guaranteed, thus opening up the possibility for women who were doing teacher training to sit for university entrance exams. So, it was from the 1960s that Brazilian women had a bigger possibility of attending university, and it was only in the 1970s that the reversal of the gender gap in university education began.
As
