Back to School

After finishing their shift at Petrobras’ Reduc refinery on the edge of Rio de Janeiro one recent spring night, dozens of workers sprinted through the rain toward the company’s cavernous canteen. After sandwiches and soft drinks, they sorted themselves into small groups and got down to work. In one corner, an elderly woman hunched over a book trying to figure out whether 99¢ was more than or less than 69¢. In another, three men helped one another with composition exercises. And in a third, workers slapped down dominoes marked with letters in place of dots. “You can see people who have never learned anything learn something every day,” says Maria Cristina Marcelino, who oversees the employees’ lessons. “It is very gratifying.”

Petrobras started this free after-work program to teach reading, arithmetic and elementary science in 2005 after officials noticed an unusually high number of accidents occurring on the shop floor because laborers could not read warning signs. More than just the workers’ safety and Petrobras’ productivity is at stake. The woeful state of education in Brazil, the world’s fifth largest country, is compromising productivity and competitiveness and acting as a brake on the country’s development, according to economists, businesspeople and educators. With the economies of China and India surging ahead, thanks in part to their large pools of educated workers, the issue has become an urgent one for Brazilian business.

“India and the Asian tigers are places that have educated populations, and that has been the basis for their economic explosions,” says Edward Glaeser, an economics professor at Harvard who studies the relationship between education and national prosperity. India and China may have illiteracy rates that are higher than Brazil’s, but they also have much larger populations of educated, skilled workers. “Brazil’s poor economic growth over the past few years is associated in part with the low level of education,” Glaeser says.

Certainly, something has held Brazil back. Brazil grew an average of 2.6% from 2000 to 2005–less than half the rate of Russia, South Korea and India and less than a third that of China. Such disparities have convinced many Brazilian business leaders that if their government does not invest in education, then they must assume the responsibility themselves. By offering lessons in everything from basic literacy to aeronautics, “companies are taking on the role of the state,” says Fernando Guimarães, director of SESI, an industrial organization that coordinates adult-education programs at big companies.

That education takes many forms. At Embraer, the world’s fourth largest commercial aircraft manufacturer and the pride of Brazil’s export industry, directors realized that the company faced a shortage of aerospace engineers because the advanced training they needed wasn’t available in Brazil. In 2000 the company set up an 18-month-long postgraduate course to train its engineers in aerodynamics and flight mechanics. So far, nearly 800 people have taken the course. “We create from inside, and we are now delivering engineers with a specialist aerospace background,” says Peter Clignett, a Dutch lecturer in Embraer’s program. “The better the engineers, the better the finished product.”

At Zanzini, a furniture maker in rural São Paulo, managers found that even employees with a high school education could not interpret graphs or follow the manuals they needed to manufacture furniture. The company set aside a room on its shop floor to use as an impromptu classroom whenever a worker on a shift needs help. “It is common to see people who can’t read or write or fill in forms,” says Zanzini’s human-resources director, Leandro Mangili. “They have finished secondary school, but they can’t add without a calculator.” The most recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that exactly half the country’s 15-year-olds failed even the most basic level of math proficiency. In reading, 74% of Brazilian students could not demonstrate detailed understanding of texts, and a quarter to a third could not read even simple sentences.

As a result of its educational failings, Brazilian companies are struggling to find qualified workers, and even those they do hire often lack the necessary savvy to contribute to the companies’ long-term success. “There are two conceptual frameworks to understand innovation,” says Alberto Rodriguez, author of a soon-to-be-released World Bank study on how better education spurs growth. “You have the high-tech, frontier innovation, and you have the adaptation and improvement of technology that happen day to day in firms.” Economists call that everyday improvement total factor productivity. It is the x factor that allows an economy to operate more efficiently, producing greater output with the same people and resources.

Having access to technology and workers with the skills to use it determine a country’s total factor productivity and, in the end, its wealth. In 1960 South Korea and Brazil had about the same per capita income. Today South Korea’s per capita income is five times Brazil’s. “Most of the growth in Korea in this period can be attributed to improvements in total factor productivity,” Rodriguez says. “And that is what Brazil needs.”

But companies alone will not be able to provide it. Improving education will take a commitment from Brazil’s leaders. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva recently admitted that Brazil was “the worst in the world” when it comes to education. A former union leader who quit school to sell peanuts and shine shoes, Lula told teachers in a speech March 15 that the old methods had clearly failed. “I don’t think Brazil will be able resolve the problem of the stock of people who were left on the margins of the educational process using the normal traditional means,” he said. “We need to think of something new.”

Just what that new strategy might be, he didn’t say. Lula’s vague promises are frustrating to Brazilian businesses, but his move to put education on the agenda gives them reason for optimism. “We still lack a clear program, but that seems to be changing,” says Guimarães. “I am hopeful.”