Drop in Enrollment in Youth and Adult Education Linked to Various Contributing Factors
The pandemic has caused a lot of damage. One of them is reflected in education. EJA (Education of Youth and Adults), since 2007, had already been in a process of decline, but, with social isolation, this increased and reached the lowest level of the century, with 2 million and 800 thousand enrollments, according to the School Census 2022, highlights Maria Clara Di Pierro, retired senior professor at the Faculty of Education at USP. According to her, several factors contributed to this result.
“There are policy mistakes and inappropriate provision, which make access to education difficult. For example, in the field of policies, there is disarticulation between the federal, state and municipal spheres of government. A merely sectoral approach, insufficient funding, there is a logic of nucleation and formation of very large classes. None of this contributes to mobilizing demand. The offer is inadequate, because the space times are very rigid, the curricula are not designed for the specificities of adult education, nor is there teacher training to work in this modality. Student assistance is insufficient and this makes EJAS unattractive”, she says.
Data from INEP (National Institute of Education and Research) estimate the number of young and adult people with less than basic education in the country at more than 73 million. The absence of a social horizon, of change and the overload of work and study tasks and family, very intense working hours, time spent commuting in large urban centers. All these factors contribute to the fact that there is little mobilization of people with low education to participate in EJA, despite this group being very large, says professor Maria Clara.
Pandemic and decline in education
She explains why the pandemic contributed to the decline in education. “An important part of EJA students did not have access to communication and information technologies, which was a means that schools found to communicate with students during the pandemic period in which schools remained closed. Although most young people and adults have access to cell phones, they do not have access to broadband or data packages that allow them to access platforms, so technological resources were insufficient. Furthermore, people live in precarious housing, large families, everyone at home, the environments were not suitable for studying and communication equipment was shared between children and adults in the families. Furthermore, the economic crisis triggered by the pandemic forced all family members to look for ways to survive.”
The EJA student profile is predominantly young and black and, although the majority of people with low education are elderly, these are not the ones who most attend their courses, but low-income people, highlights the professor . “So, I have a precarious insertion in the job market, they live in urban outskirts, women also assume many responsibilities for caring for children and the elderly, all of this creates a profile in which regular school attendance competes with other family responsibilities. and survival.”
Mobilization
The educator highlights that it would be necessary to mobilize public authorities and organized civil society to reverse this reality. “They should expand the perspectives of social change, employment, income, justice and care and qualify the offer by making a public call, ensuring student assistance. But it also requires actions by organized civil society, employers, social movements, media, in building a culture of the right to education throughout life and raising the level of awareness of rights holders”.
Evening high school included an extension of the school day, but workers who study during these hours were harmed. For the teacher, the solution would be to expand, lengthen the duration of the years of night school studies, which could translate into an improvement in the quality of learning, but this fundamentally depends on the adequacy of curricula, methodologies, school organization and student assistance so that young people and working adults can remain in schools for an even longer period.