Andres Oppenheimer
When I asked
"
While
According to official figures, 10 percent of
"What's so impressive about
Indeed, Brazilian business leaders have concluded that the answer to the region's education problems is not likely to come from governments -- or from politicians -- but from civil society.
Governments don't make long-term investments in improving the quality of education because they need short-term results, which can be shown in time for the next elections. So governments tend to invest in brick-and-mortar things such as school buildings, roads and bridges, which can be ready in two or three years, rather than in training for teachers and principals, which are investments that often render concrete results in the classroom in as long as a decade.
Digging deeper into the Brazilian pro-education movement, I found that
The new group, All for Education, was founded among others by the presidents of the DPaschoal car parts chain, the
Once it had defined its five goals -- including that all Brazilian children remain in school until age 17 -- the group recruited the owners of
"One of our first challenges was to convince the media," Pascoal said. "I met with several newspaper and TV network editors and at first they were skeptical. But we convinced them that education is the only way to make our country grow. ... After a while, they all ended up supporting us. I can't think of any of
He added, "Education has become a priority: You can see it everywhere, in the newspapers, on television, in what politicians talk about."
And judging from the results, the campaign worked. A poll by CNO/IBOPE in late 2009 showed that the quality of education had become the second biggest concern of Brazilians, after crime. Earlier in the decade, education had scored below seventh place among Brazilians' biggest concerns on most years.
Not surprisingly, the government reacted to the public pressure, and quickly adopted the All for Education's five-point mission statement. President Luiz Inácio
"These civil society movements are a positive thing," Education Minister
While completing a book on the most interesting innovations in education, science and technology around the world over the past five years, I found a similar pro-education civil society movement in
Like its Brazilian counterpart, the Israeli nongovernment group has set five concrete goals to improve education standards, and has enlisted business people, well-known artists and soccer players to help spread its message.
"We take advantage of our members' celebrity status to be constantly in the media," Lautman said. "We have set very concrete goals, with clearly defined deadlines, and we are constantly in the media putting pressure on the government to meet them. And when the government doesn't, we unleash our entire media artillery on the government."
Judging from what's happening in countries as diverse as
Increasingly, people are realizing that education is the key to their personal, family and national future. As we're seeing in
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(C) 2010 Andres Oppenheimer