Brazil has more students who graduate as teachers than other countries, but has a lower rate of interest in the profession

Brazil is one of the countries with the highest proportion of students enrolled in courses to train teachers, but with one of the lowest rates of interest in the profession.

For specialists, this shows that teaching becomes an option due to the ease of entering higher education, low monthly fees and the alternative of distance learning courses – and not due to vocation.

International studies show that a good teacher is one of the factors that most influence learning.

The data comes from a survey carried out by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), which outlined the profile of those studying to become teachers in Latin America and the Caribbean. While in Brazil, 20% of university students are in courses such as Licentiate and Pedagogy, in Latin America they are 10%, and in developed countries, 8%.

On the other hand, only 5% of young Brazilians say they want to be teachers when they are in high school. And, despite the large number of students in these courses in Brazil, there is a lack of professors to teach specific disciplines in the areas of exact sciences and science.

In South Korea, for example, 21% are interested in the profession and only 7% actually enter university, because there is a lot of competition and greater selection. In Chile and Mexico, the two rates are closer, around 7% are interested and less than 15% are studying Pedagogy or Licentiate.

According to an investigation by Estadão, the Ministry of Education (MEC) should announce at the end of the month a teacher training program with a review of curriculum guidelines.

“Many high school students enter teacher training programs as a refuge, there are not many requirements and it ends up being an easier path to getting a degree”, says the chief economist of the education division at the IDB, Gregory Elacqua. “This is not good for education.”

The survey also shows that the Pisa score – international student assessment – ​​of young Brazilians and other Latinos who want to be teachers is lower than the average. In countries like Germany, Finland and Japan, it is higher than the others. As a result, after graduation, teachers in Latin America find it difficult to pass public tenders or receive certifications.

“We attract the most vulnerable people who, in the future, will also face the challenge of educating vulnerable children”, says the director of public policies at Instituto Península, which works in the area of ​​teacher training, Mariana Breim.

“If this public is looking for teaching, we have to embrace it and make them fall in love with it”, he adds. Data show that 71% of Pedagogy and Degree students are women in Brazil, a similar rate in other Latin countries.

Mariana sees the rapid growth of distance courses to train teachers as a problem. Today, 1.6 million people are studying degrees in Brazil, 60% of them at a distance. Researches show that this modality has higher evasion rates and that 70% of students do not complete even the minimum number of hours of mandatory internship.

“Teaching is a relational activity. He will teach face-to-face and not remote classes afterwards. The student needs help to stay at university and needs to go to school from the earliest years,” she says.

For Elacqua, Brazil must invest heavily in valuing the profession, with national campaigns, as Singapore and Korea have done, in addition to selecting more rigorously who can be a teacher and have scholarships to guarantee the permanence of these students in the courses.

Data show that out of ten students who enroll in teacher training courses, four drop out in the first two years and two more in the remainder. This is due to the quality of the course, but also to the difficulty in finishing higher education, since most are in private universities.

scholarship proposal

One of the proposals of the Teaching Profession Movement, which brings together entities from the third sector, with support from the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV), is a scholarship that would combine the value of two grants that already exist today in the Ministry of Education (MEC), with new requirements . The new grant would pay R$ 1,300. Scholarships were readjusted to R$ 700 by the Lula government.

MEC said that teacher training is a priority issue and that one of the focuses is to bring students who want to be teachers closer to classrooms. The idea is to “strengthen degree programs, reviewing guidelines, in partnership with institutions”.

*With information from the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo