08/17/10 by Aprender Team | Blog | No Comments »
Our team were finally re-united in Uberlandia, a city Aprender has visited on many occasions but only as a transit point. Our strategy is to find a local church we can work with, who understands and supports our objectives and who has good community networks. ‘Missao Sal da Terra’ has it’s roots in local mission and is the charity that has invited Phil and the family to work with them and helped with the visa. Their HQ is Uberlandia and so we were able to make contact with Pastor Vivaldo and Pastor Gilberto who have been fantastic.
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05/18/10 by Aprender Team | Why we're here | No Comments »
Brazil is an amazing country. Pelé, Robinho, Kaká, Rio’s Copacabana beach, Bossa Nova, the mighty River Amazon, pink dolphins, anacondas, macaws and surrounding rainforest. Brazilians are warm, Creative, disarmingly informal and totally family-centric. Brazilian Portuguese is lilting and soft and has been described as sounding like ‘Sean Connery speaking Italian’. Visit Brazil and you will always want to return. This world’s fourth largest democracy in the ascendency- it was one of the last countries into recession in 2008 and one of the first out. Football’s World Cup and the Olympic Games will move to Brazil over this next decade. And yet it is also a country deeply divided:
- Brazil has one of the most unequal distributions of wealth of any country. The wealthiest 10% of people do 48% of consumer shopping (compared to the USA, the top 10% buy 30.5% of shopping)
- 50% of Brazilians attended school for less than 2 years.
- Private Universities account for 75% of undergraduate places.
- 25% of people over the age of 10 are illiterate.
- Only 1 in 3 who enter school finish Year 7.
State education is poor. Brazilian parents will work every hour of the day if it means they can get their children into a private school. Once there, smaller class sizes, better conditions and better pay for higher quality teaching means that young people have a chance of making it to University, and with that comes the real chance of a good job, higher salary and moving into the emerging middle classes. In the state school system, very few students make the grade. Large class sizes, severe vandalism, under-qualified teachers, poor behaviour, disaffection and the knowledge that you are not going to make the grade makes the educational outcomes for young people bleak.
Aprender’s vision is to see young people move out of poverty through receiving a higher quality education. We will learn lessons from both staff and students along the way and will be able to share these and build best practice.
In essence, we will ‘learn together’ by being together.
The Brazilian government have invested huge resources so that every child in the country has a place in a school. Having largely achieved this momentous target, their next aim is to improve the quality of education in their schools. Aprender’s main aim is to work with the government in achieving this goal.
