UNESCO in Brazil, Palavra Aberta and TSE discuss education and citizenship in a webinar
UNESCO in Brazil, Instituto Palavra Aberta EducaMídia, and the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) of Brazil held, on Friday afternoon (7), the webinar “Education for Citizenship”. The objective was to address issues such as media education, democracy, and disinformation in the school environment. The meeting was mediated by Patrícia Blanco, president of Palavra Aberta, and was attended by the Director and Representative of UNESCO in Brazil, Marlova Jovchelovitch Noleto; the president of the TSE and minister of the Supreme Federal Court (STF), Luís Roberto Barroso; and the president of Todos Pela Educação, Priscila Cruz.
At the opening, Patrícia pointed out that with the advancement of technology and the offer of new communication tools, today we are all producers and consumers of content and that the excess of information that travels on the Internet is a challenge to the critical sense. According to her, “it is necessary to know how to interpret intention, authorship, and context, in addition to mastering the tools and languages that allow us to exercise our freedom of expression in a conscious, ethical and responsible manner”.
Minister Barroso recalled that education is a fundamental prerequisite for the exercise of conscious citizenship. “It is the raw material for citizenship. The lack of basic education, in addition to disturbing the citizen, also disturbs the country, especially now that we are on the verge of a great technological revolution ”.
Regarding the current scenario of education in the country and in the world, Marlova Noleto mentioned a recent speech by the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, for whom “education is the foundation for fairer societies and one of the engines to drive sustainable development ”. According to her, there are 1.6 billion students affected by the new coronavirus pandemic on all continents and the longer they stay out of school, the greater the risk that they will not return, thus increasing school dropout. “We are concerned that the pandemic has exacerbated all educational disparities. Because of it, all the progress made in the last decades can be canceled, ” he said.
Priscila Cruz addressed the importance of education being uniform across the country: “Education is important for each of the children and young people in Brazil. We all have the right to education, even in the most remote places. What bothers me most is that we have 55% of children illiterate. We need to provide even more quality education to the poorest ”.
In addition to the theme of education and citizenship, the webinar had two other blocks, with the themes “hate speech / harmful content” and “democracy and freedom of expression”, followed by questions from the public. The virtual meeting can be fully accessed at the Justiça Eleitoral channel on YouTube (access here – only in Portuguese).