The Condition of Brazilian Higher Education

Written by Olavo de Carvalho

Thursday, 01 August 2013 18:15
Lecture delivered at the Leadership Institute, Arlington, VA, on July 23, 2013.

I am aware that the presence of educators and speakers of various nationalities at this
conference would suggest to me the convenience of speaking about universal and borderless
themes. However, the situation of education in Brazil has become so dire that it barely can be
understood by foreign observers. A sense of urgency, then, impels me to breach etiquette and
address Brazilians more directly than others here present.

Since we are all gathered in this place to meditate on the ends and means of education in a
serious manner, I would like to start my speech by making a vow: may God forbid and keep my
speech from going beyond what I can personally do. The easiest and cheapest thing in the
world for an educator to do is to propose grandiose and even universally comprehensive goals
and purposes, which he will never bring about and whose results he will never be held
accountable for. Ninety percent of those who are praised as pioneers, reformers, and
revolutionaries of politics, education, or thought are prophets of the imponderable, that scum of
mankind who have always had the prudence to withdraw from this low world before their
beautiful proposals have been transformed into the depressing and often bloody realities that
they foretell.

The first thing that should be required of any educator is that he knows precisely whom he
intends to educate, for how long he needs to educate his students, and what are the evaluation
criteria with which he will gauge the success or failure of his venture. Virtually none of those
who are today lauded as great educators pass this test. Neither Paulo Freire, nor Jean Piaget,
nor Vygostky, nor Emilia Ferreiro. The disastrous results of socio-constructivism are already so
old and so widely known as the very idea that generated them, and yet the prestige of this
school does not seem to have been shaken in the least, precisely because the public has
become used to the contemporary idea that what one should expect from an educator is not
that he educates people, but rather that he helps them change the world.

Peoples mindset has been so imbued with the cult of universal change that nowadays there is
virtually no person who does not follow, unconsciously at least, the maxim of that greatest
prince of elegant stupidity who was Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: A new untruth is better than
an old truth.

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The Condition of Brazilian Higher Education
Written by Olavo de Carvalho
Thursday, 01 August 2013 18:15
The greatest of all educators, Socrates, never made plans for global education nor ever thought
about pre-formatting the minds of future generations, but he merely confined himself to
educating those who were within his reach, that is, a single generation, a small circle of
students, out of which emerged two other great philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, whose
teaching still continues to educate us today.

So, God forbid that I should create any educational project which I cannot personally carry out
and whose results I cannot myself evaluate during the course of my life.

Accordingly, any education project that I might dare to subscribe should be a provisional
response to a given situation and not a model to be imitated per omnia seculae saeculorum.
The immediate problem that my personal educational project attempted to tackle is the
complete debacle of university education in Brazil. Of course, there is not a single country in the
world in which people do not talk about a similar debacle, but we must be careful not to be
misled by the use of the same word to qualify different situations. For the word debacle just
describes a generic quality and does not convey an idea of the extent of the problem, and it is in
the quantitative aspect of the collapse of its higher education that Brazil goes beyond the
imagination of those who complain of the poor state of university education in their own
countries. Maybe you can have a better idea of Brazils state of things in education when you
know the fact that my native country, having more university professors per capita than any
other nation, and now having virtually no children out of school, produces students who usually
rank last in international education tests. Not coincidentally, Brazil is also a country in which all
public discussion about education always revolves around funding and investments, without
educational contents and techniques ever becoming a discussion pointconsequently, one
must infer that, to the Brazilian national imagination, money must have some educational power
in itself, transcending human agency. Even more characteristic of the Brazilian mind of today is
the fact that our former president, Mr. Luiz Incio Lula da Silva, has become an object of
general admiration not because he has risen from a poor background thanks to a cultural
improvement he achieved through his own effort, but precisely because he managed to climb
up the social ladder with no cultural improvement at all. People even compared him to Abraham
Lincoln, but the contrast could not be greater between the poor axeman who developed
intellectually to become one of the best writers of the English language and the man who
distinguished himself rather by his physical transfiguration of a bearded and tattered poor man
into an elegant figure with polished nails and dressed in sumptuous Armani suits than for any
remarkable progress he made to overcome his original illiteracy. Brazils history is laden with
poor people who acquired an education through their own effort and rose, by their own
intellectual merits, far above their original station in life. I would even say that they preponderate
numerically over the notable men of the upper class. The public prestige of Mr. Luiz Incio is, in
this sense, a most significant sociological phenomenon because it indicates a radical change in
the judging criterion employed to evaluate the social rise of the humble. Previously, the value of
an education acquired by ones own merits prevailed over the hierarchy of social positions, but
the success of Mr. Lula shows that this judgment has been reversed: being in high places is
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The Condition of Brazilian Higher Education
Written by Olavo de Carvalho
Thursday, 01 August 2013 18:15
valued in itself, much more than any effort of self-education.

I mention this phenomenon because, more than any other, it denotes the mental state of affairs
in contemporary Brazil. The worship of high places, coupled with the most arrogant contempt for
knowledge, has become the general rule. In Brazil, a person is no longer required to have made
discoveries, created works, and generated great ideas to be acknowledged as an intellectual
and an educator of the masses. Rather, what is required of him is that he has occupied civil
service positions, held the offices in the public administration, been a member of government
commissions; in short, what counts is not who he is in terms of the substance of his creative
and thinking person, but in terms of his place in the state bureaucracy.

I began documenting this state of things in my 1995 book The Collective Imbecile: Brazilian
Uncultural News. But since then the situation has worsened so formidably that it can no longer
be described in a comic and satiric key as it was in that book. Public stupidity has grown to the
point where it has become fearful. It has established itself as a form of power which can impose
upon a whole generation of students the most complete ineptitude as an essential regulatory
obligation.

Because of this state of things, in 2005 I created an online Philosophy Seminar, which today
has about three thousand students from all over Brazil and also some other countries. Based on
the final projects I have received so far I am sure that these students, whom I asked to refrain
from any public activity until they are properly prepared for it, are already an intellectual elite
incomparably superior to that which has come out of Brazilian universities and occupied the
most important positions in the media, education, and the publishing industry.

Never have I thought about educating other people than those who fell within my reach through
the Philosophy Seminar . Nor do I have suggestions about the teaching of subjects which are
outside my field of expertise. My students are being educated in the fields of literature,
philosophy, and social sciences, precisely those which have been most affected after four
decades of absolute rule of the semi-illiterate mandarinate.

However, from this limited experience I can draw some conclusions which may be useful to
other people who have the intention of becoming educators.

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The Condition of Brazilian Higher Education
Written by Olavo de Carvalho
Thursday, 01 August 2013 18:15
The first is that the contempt for knowledge in Brazil has always been coupled with the worship
of outward signs which stand for knowledge and which, seemingly with some advantage,
replace it: degrees, diplomas, titles, honors, media space, good connections in high circles, and
so on and so forth. The phenomenon has been so widely documented and satirized in our best
fiction literature (Lima Barreto and Graciliano, for example) that I see no need to insist on it.

But the worst is that a circle of mutual reinforcement between those two complementary vices
was formed a long time ago, and this circle seems impossible to break .

It works like this: since our business and political elite is not exactly well educated, the
well-meaning souls who emerge from it having the laudable purpose of remedying the national
evils are by themselves unable to distinguishthrough a direct examination of works and
ideasbetween who is competent and who is an eminent airhead among the available
intellectuals. As a result, they will have to judge them by outward signsthose darn titles and
positionsand they will end up giving heed to those who have nothing important to tell them nor
useful to suggest. Unculture generates unculture with the fertility of a couple of rabbits.

This becomes even worse when a deceiving prestige comes from abroad, landing in Brazil with
all the pomp and ceremony suited to the most modern thing of all. In the Vargas
administration, a beautiful project of popular education ended up taking as model the ideas of
John Dewey, then very celebrated by the American media as a great innovator. Today it is
known that Dewey was, in fact, the destroyer of the American education, which until then was
the best in the world. From 1960s onwardsduring the military dictatorship in Brazil, social
constructivism became fashionable, being adorned with names such as Jean Piaget, Emilia
Ferrero, Vygotsky, and many others. For half a century the application of this nonsensical
theory has brutalized the minds of our children with admirable constancy, at the same time that
the triumphal expansion of the number of schools and the increasingly centralized control of
national education has spread the democratization of ineptitude to the farthest corners and the
poorest people of the country.

And why do these things happen? Because Brazils uneducated elite goes along with the media
and the volatile prestige of the cultural celebrities of the day instead of examining and testing
their ideas. And by doing so our elite only heaps up errors and disasters with an obscene
persistence.

Whoever notices this phenomenon cannot but conclude that Brazils chief educational problem
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The Condition of Brazilian Higher Education
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is precisely the opposite of what people usually say it is. That is to say, our problem is not that
we have educated the elite and left the people behind, but rather that we have tried to provide
education to all the people before we have a qualified elite to educate them, or even to seriously
examine the problem of popular education.

Anyone who has been a teacher at least for a day immediately realizes that the educational
process has a radiating structure: first you educate ten people, who in turn will go on and
educate a hundred people, who in turn will educate a thousand people, who in turn will educate
one million, and so on and so forth. To reverse this order is like wanting children to generate
their parents. The rulers of this country have promised education to millions of people before
they have been able to gather together ten serious educators to discuss how they are going to
do this. Why not educate the first ten people? And to those who may object that this is
right-wing elitism, I recommend they read Lenin and ask themselves why he organized the
Communist partys elite first and then the mass. Lenin knew that the tail does not wag the dog.

How to break the vicious circle of an uneducated elite guided by amateurs as inept as itself ?

In my view, there is only one way: we have to raise, outside the official educational system, far
from the mainstream media, far from long-established prestige, a new, sincere, and
well-prepared class of intellectuals, who, moreover, must be aggressive enough to, in due
course, behead airheads, expel sacred cows, and start dealing with problems in a serious
manner.

A second conclusion is that a government can only define programs, methods, budgets, that
is, the more external and insubstantial aspects of education. None of these abstract universals
has the ability to go into the classroom and guide the souls and minds of students towards their
better development. The teachers personality is all. You can ask any student of any grade
about it. Some teachers make deep impressions on students and have an almost hormonal
influence on their intellectual and human growth, others are justly forgotten after a few years,
and still others become traumatic obstacles to any conceivable progress.

The problem here is somewhat the same as everywhere else: the problem of human quality.
Governments are so helpless about it that sometimes the worst regimes in the world raise, by
the power of suffering, the best personalities; and as soon as conditions improve, the souls
settle down and deteriorate.
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The Condition of Brazilian Higher Education
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The raising of better individuals can only come from society itself, from spontaneous cultural
initiative. Religious organizations, neighborhood associations and clubs, labor unions,
community centers can do a lot about it, provided that they are not committed to any political
agenda aimed at standardizing minds to use them as pawns. In Brazil, to find a civic association
which is free of this commitment has become increasingly difficult.

Finally, there remains the problem of home education. In Brazil, the permanent state of social
and economic insecurity leads parents, in their desire to seek an immediate guarantee of
livelihood for their children, to deliberately turn their kids into mediocre human beings, inducing
them to get an education only to be able to pass civil service exams, instead of promoting the
development of their intelligence to reach more ambitious goals in the long term. A good
intention deformed by fear is no longer a good intention and becomes a deforming prosthesis. I
have observed this phenomenon in virtually all Brazilian families I have met.

A little bit of educational experience shows that the desire for premature social adaptation can
cripple a mind and severely limit the very prospects for social ascension. People do not come
with their vocations stamped on their foreheads, nor with a manual where they can find out in
advance their most promising talents. But what is absolutely certain is that one can only be
successful in those things which reflect ones deepest innate talents. A teenager who dreams of
trying his hand at sports, fine arts, or any profession which seems exotic to his familylike a
career in the merchant marine, in polar expeditions, or animal caretakingcan easily be
induced to failure if his parents impose upon him choices which seem more realistic in a
limited and mediocre mental atmosphere. I dare say that this is one of the most widespread
causes of human failure in Brazil.

If you think your child is a moron who cannot survive in a field of free choice and without the
crutches of a depressing government job, it would have been better if you had not generated
him, or if you had given him to be raised by a more optimistic family.

Besides, what help can the Brazilian government offer in such matters if it is itself predominantly
staffed with inept people for whom the epithet mediocre would even be a compliment?

To the present Brazilian government, as to most of its Latin American counterparts, the new
generations are but instruments for the implementation of nominally saving policies which
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The Condition of Brazilian Higher Education
Written by Olavo de Carvalho
Thursday, 01 August 2013 18:15
despise the present generation in the name of an elusive and unattainable future. I say
unattainable not only because they are unrealizable in practice, but because their conception
is already infected with the promise of endless deferral. Every revolutionary politics, which aims
to reshape the world in its image and likeness, begins by denying all higher values in order to
be able to establish its own values, which implies that a revolutionary politics cannot accept any
judge superior to itself. This is why only the permanent revolution exists, that is, the pursuit of
goals which have neither a definition nor a deadline to be achieved, so that the revolutionary
work might never be judged but might always keep pushing itself further into the future so that it
might perpetuate its condition of sole judge of all things.

The third and final conclusion relates to the difference between education and instruction. To
instruct a student is simply to pass on to him a set of procedures, habits, techniques, and even
mental tics that the teacher has received ready-made. The Department of Education should be
called the Department of Instruction, because every educational activity whose model comes
from above and is uniformly imposed to an entire population is only instruction. Education, as
the etymology of the word implies, has something to do with opening the eyes of the student so
that he might see the larger world around him, and he might see it with his own individual and
intransferable eyes, without anybody imprisoning him in a preexisting framework. Clearly, if
instruction can be a social activity performed by a collectivity of technicians, education, in the
sense that I understand it, must be a deep connection between the soul of the teacher and the
soul of the student, a relationship that imitates on a smaller and limited scale the relationship
between father and son. Thus, it is clear that the teacher has to convey to the student, rather
than this or that particular piece of knowledge, a certain inspiration, a power, an enthusiasm,
and a love for the search for the truth. And it is also clear that no one can give what he himself
does not have. True education is a laborious and late result of the effort of self-education, which
takes place in the soul of the educator and precedes education.

These considerations, however, are so far above the current state of affairs in Brazilian
education that I do not see any way to put them into action except in small groups, without any
illusion of interfering in the present state of things, but preparing, perhaps, a better future.




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The Condition of Brazilian Higher Education
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Olavo de Carvalho is the President of The Inter-American Institute, Distinguished Senior
Fellow in Philosophy, Political Science, and the Humanities.


Translation by Alessandro Cota.


The opinions published here are those of the writer and are not necessarily endorsed by the
Institute.

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