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I miss Dona Lucy

Sandra Brisolla

EI was about 12 years old and in my second year of high school (today it's equivalent to my sixth year). series) when I had my first English classes with Dona Lucy. She was a competent teacher and proud of her role, at a state school on the outskirts of São Paulo. Every now and then she would bring visits from the Brazil-United States Cultural Institute or Cultura Inglesa, occasions when she liked to showcase the knowledge of her best students. He pretended to choose from the attendance list, dropping his index finger on any name on the sheet, but invariably called the same people, some of English or American descent, but many of them just diligent students, more excited about the possibility of understanding the letters. of the "rocks", who want to use the language for a future career. This made us laugh and especially enjoy Dona Lucy's visits.

Being single and with a salary that was reasonable at the time, our English teacher had her own car - an English Ford, a luxury for the time. She drove with little skill, to say the least, which meant that she often apologized to us for not having stopped at the bus stop to offer us a ride, as coming on the left hand side, she would not have been able to pass to the right.

It was Dona Lucy - in addition to the dances where blues and rock'n roll were played - who awakened my curiosity and desire to learn English, and when I was her student, my colleague Ivete Pereira and I managed to enter directly into the third and final six-month internship on the Yázigi English course, which was emerging in Brazil at the time, in the mid-50s. This learning was very useful for me in being accepted into my first job as a journalist, as the magazine where I worked for almost two years used many articles translated directly from English.

Many decades later, I learned - what a small world! - that Dona Lucy was the aunt of my friend and colleague Leda, whom I met in Chile, on my travels around Latin America!

But my memories of my time at Colégio Estadual Alberto Conte don't stop there. There was Teixeira, a mathematics professor who terrified students with his rigor, but had recognized teaching skills, also teaching engineering students at the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo. And what about Dona Ivete, a Portuguese teacher, who even gave a negative grade, as she deducted half a point from her essays for an error in accentuation, a point for a spelling error and a point and a half for an error in agreement! In Alberto Conte's high school course, philosophy classes were taught by Emir Sader, now a professor at USP, at the time a student at the Faculty of Philosophy at that University.

This was the secret to the quality of public primary and secondary education during my school years: decent salaries, identification with the profession and recruitment among the best students at the best universities in the country. Any similarity with the current situation of public primary and secondary education can only be a mistake!

The increase in public education coverage was largely at the expense of a drop in quality, but the opening of the salary range that accompanied the infamous "economic miracle" was largely responsible for this process of deteriorating salaries and the image of primary and secondary teachers. secondary schools in the country.

Thus, in the 70s - in just 20 years - public primary and secondary education became synonymous with low quality and private schools - previously a refuge for bad students - multiplied, especially in centers of greater relative economic development, such as the state of São Paulo. In these, quality was not always the hallmark, but the demand from the public university - which continued to be the best level - required that part of the supply from private institutions corresponded to its needs.

This historical process was responsible for the current situation: it is mainly good students from the best private primary and secondary schools who manage to pass the entrance exams for the country's good public universities. A contradiction that cannot be resolved by deteriorating the level of the latter, but rather by providing quality public schools.

Contrary to these social needs, however, the progressive commitment of the Brazilian economic structure to international financial capital is about to deliver the coup de grace to what remains of quality, with honorable exceptions, in Brazilian public education: higher education! And this result will only be the byproduct of a pension reform process that will compromise the efficiency of the entire public sector. And the worst thing is that it is done in the name of so-called "social justice"!

It takes decades of investment to create a scientific community with international standards, as was done in Brazil from the 70s onwards, and just a few years of bad policies to destroy everything that was built through Capes' excellent postgraduate and research program. and CNPq.

The enviable situation of science in Brazil, within Latin America, has been responsible for the increase in agricultural productivity in several essential products, for domestic consumption and export, recreating climates and soils favorable to previously imported cereals, genetically improving livestock, increasing competitiveness of various economic sectors in the international market, replacing the import of essential inputs for industrial activity, and reducing oil imports from two thirds to 20% of domestic consumption, due to the development of deep water prospecting technologies.

The saddest thing is that for the country to be rescued from this profound social inequality, from this third consecutive decade of stagnation, it is essential to expand the knowledge necessary to transform human relationships, in order to break this vicious circle. And this knowledge can only be built with increased investment in education, health and science and technology. Something that the tax reform also threatens to reduce, by decoupling state and Union revenues from their mandatory applications (at least by law) in social investment.

The Brazil of my high school days wasn't necessarily better than the Brazil of my children's youth, but we could still dream of a more just society and we had a project for the country, for which many of us lost our lives or part of it. Today we feel helpless and frustrated because almost all of our flags have been stolen from us, one by one!

However, there is still hope! Rescue the dreams of the many Lucys that exist in the country! Even if we have to handpick, pretending to be random, people who are capable of excelling in their tasks of rescuing citizenship - as was the case with my gym classmate Yara Spadini, an inseparable friend at the time, who I never suspected was fighting companion, as I only heard about her later in the newspapers -, which made possible the necessary change in the course of history. This will be the real show we want to watch!

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Sandra Brisolla She is a retired professor and volunteer at the Department of Scientific and Technological Policy, IG, Unicamp.

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