Summary
This article aims to relate the increase in sustainable productivity with the increase in education indices. He makes it clear that only sustainably increasing productivity can save society and our species. It also comments on the future challenges and the role of education in them, mainly through the reduction of illiteracy and functional illiteracy. Clarifies that the EJA methodology can be this materialization tool, by reducing noise socio-cultural aspects in the learning process and which can even be applied to other levels of education.
The ILO – International Labor Organization, through the fifth edition of its KILM (Key
Indicators of the Labor Market) published some worrying indices for Brazil in terms of labor productivity. The ILO claims that Brazilian worker productivity has fallen in 25 years. While it was US$15,100/year in 1980, in 2005 it went to US$14,700/year.
Furthermore, the source also mentions that Brazilian productivity per worker is one of the lowest in Latin America. For example, in the case of Argentina it was US$24,700/year and that of Chile, US$30,700/year per worker. And when compared to the United States, the ILO states that in 1980 the Brazilian industrial productivity was equivalent to 19% of the American one, while 20 years later, it passed to a mere 5%.
But after all, what is productivity?
Productivity, according to Paulo Sandroni, is the “result of the division of physical production
obtained in a unit of time (hour, day, year) by one of the factors employed in production (labor, land, capital) (1996, p. 341)." That is, the more you produce in a given time, the more productive a worker, equipment, any process, when compared to another. Productivity, roughly speaking, means more. Sandroni also mentions that “it is important to note that productivity tends to be higher in capital-intensive firms and lower in labor-intensive ones (1996, p. 342)." Which means, greater productivity obtained through mechanization in relation to manual activity, and that "often the increased productivity through the adoption of technological improvements has negative social repercussions, as it can cause unemployment (SANDRONI, 1996, p. 342)”.
Mechanization in the past was seen as a way to reduce the workload that
each should perform in order to meet their needs. The obvious conclusion is that
we should work less and less in modern society. Unfortunately, it didn't go that way.
Instead of a reduction in work, what we see today is “a division between the unemployed and the overburdened (2000, p. 113)”, in the words of David Cohen. The author states that “what prevents the distribution of work is that our needs increase as they are satisfied (2000, p. 116)”. The author quotes Michael Dertouzos, head of the MIT Computer Science Laboratory as saying: “if human nature is left loose, the temptation to have more things and use more services will prevail, and goodbye to the workless society (COHEN, 2000, p. 116)”. Does this mean that it is our fault that we are overworked and others out of work, in misery? Essentially yes. It should be made clear that employees and bosses, despite the existing millenary antagonism, are interrelated and one depends on the other. Without capital there is no company and without employees, too. And without a company, there are no employees or bosses. Because the characters in this story are people and, as such, subject to human ambition, it is natural that the business scenario is very competitive and troubled, with disparate attitudes on both sides, which generally do nothing but harm the organization's performance and the results they themselves seek catch up.
We must also not forget that as productivity increases in society
human, the ecological imbalance becomes increasingly greater, resulting from the search for raw materials and the waste resulting from the process and consumption.
So, what's the point of increasing productivity if it doesn't bring visible benefits to
people or nature?
Why increase productivity?
Despite this, we must not forget that increasing productivity is the only way to provide food, clothing, living conditions, in short, to an increasingly populated and chaotic world. Unfortunately its side effect is the degradation of nature that this entails.
and the real possibility of our extinction.
Let us imagine an industrial society, similar to the one existing in 1920, that had to feed and care for our 6.4 billion inhabitants, without to be able to count on advanced machinery, chemical fertilizers, industrialized pesticides and, above all, sophisticated and in abundance. Malthus, already stated in 1798, that “...the population, when not controlled, grows in a geometrical progression. The means of livelihood in an arithmetic progression (1996, p. 246).”
This basically means that while the population tends to grow, multiplying
(ie, a man and a woman give rise to one or more new beings, and so on), livelihoods (food, clothing, housing) grow by adding only (I can make more x pieces of clothing or produce more y kilos of beans). Malthus saw that procreation would far outstrip production. Fortunately, human vegetative growth was not as accelerated as he imagined and new technological achievements supplied the increase in demand.
But, little more than two centuries later, the drama returns to the fore, with the aggravation of the ecological imbalance and the lack of water drinking, emerging diseases and overpopulation, many of them caused by the very technological achievements that We did. According to the Austrian physicist and writer, Fritjof Capra, one of the icons of the so-called New Age, “the vision of the world and the system of values that are in the basis of our culture, and which have to be carefully re-examined, were formulated in their essential lines in the 16th and 17th centuries (1995, P. 49)”.
The author believes, quite correctly in my opinion, that human attitudes must change under the risk of imminent disappearance from our society and perhaps, from the species itself. This change encompasses new ways of thinking and acting, treating the planet in a better and self-sustaining way, doing more with fewer resources. This seems to go against increasing productivity.
Nothing more wrong. The increase in productivity does not need to go through environmental destruction or the disappearance of the species. It is enough that new values are taken into account when the risk of environmental and social damage, aiming only for immediate profit, comes to the fore. Today it is still imagined that any means should be used to increase profits. If the problem is one of administrative failures, let's cut staff to compensate. If it costs a lot to properly dispose of industrial waste, we're going to throw it away in a vacant lot when no one is looking, it doesn't matter what harm they cause as long as there's a financial advantage.
Fortunately, this view is changing globally, albeit too slowly to avoid the damage, but it's a start. The creation of the ISO 14000 standard, aiming at “environmental management”, which means “what the organization does to minimize the harmful effects on the environment caused by its activities (ISO, 2000)”. It is proof of this change in vision. If it's too late for change, only time will tell.
It is not just the environment that is attacked in the process. The human being too. very if
it speaks of the need for greater labor productivity to meet the globalization of the economy. But what does this really mean? What does this do for ordinary people? Pranab Bardhan, professor of economics at the University of Berkeley, cites that “states
weak, unreliable regimes, concentrated incomes, inept or corrupt politicians and bureaucrats combine to undermine the opportunities of the poor. Opening markets without solving these domestic problems forces people to compete with their hands tied. The result could be even more poverty (2006, p. 88).”
Take for example Brazil. Our governments never had a vision of the breadth of
process of improving the workforce. In the past, the more ignorant a person, the more easily controlled and dominated. This encouraged unscrupulous and authoritarian governments to remain in power. Today, faced with global demands, what we see is a profusion of unskilled labor, which cannot compete with foreign labor in numerous sectors. A Brazilian employee is generally less productive than a Chinese or Hindu. It makes us stagnate.
The headline “Brazil seeks growth revenue”, published in the State of São Paulo in
May 21, 2006, illustrates what I say, when he states that "in 25 years, the country's GDP grew 85%, while China's has multiplied by 10 and India's has quadrupled." The article mentions that “completing the fiscal adjustment, reducing expenses, improving the quality of the State, investing in education and putting into practice an industrial policy focused on innovation... are some of the main recommendations – detailed during the 18th National Forum, organized by former Planning Minister João Paulo dos Reis Velloso, in Rio – to unveil what is considered a enigma for many economists: why Brazil interrupted the trajectory of accelerated growth in the 1980s and never resumed an acceptable pace in comparison with other economies emerging? (DANTAS, 2006)"
How does our country differ from theirs? In the education of its citizens. Even in income distribution. And arguably, they have much bigger problems than ours in terms of overpopulation, availability of arable land and abundance of natural resources!
***
One of the most visionary men the twentieth century had was, without a doubt, Henry Ford. He
revolutionized the forms of production by inventing the assembly line -- where each employee was responsible for only a few specific tasks (there is no way forget the image of Carlitos tightening screws in a factory in the 1936 movie Modern Times) -- which allowed the industry to develop fantastically automaker experimented (and others who joined his invention), in addition to opening countless jobs and contributing to the improvement of the well-being of legions of workers. He established a value for his cars, very low by the standards of the time, when compared to competitors - US$ 750 per unit for the model T (DRUCKER, 1999, p. 23) - reduced costs in the production chain in order to make a profit even selling at this value - a finding in the matter of business administration -- and most importantly, he saw his own employees as potential customers for his product.
If Ford had already figured out how to increase their earnings and productivity
through the use of labor, including making your employees potential buyers of your products, that is, including them in the virtuous circle of the business, because this was forgotten over the time? Why didn't Brazil follow the idea and fortify its domestic market? Why didn't you invest properly in your people?
Productivity and the future of society
It is quite clear then, that only increasing productivity, in an ecologically and socially responsible way, can make a future for us. Wars in the past eliminated a large part of the population, which allowed a rebalancing of resources existing, in addition to providing incredible technological advances, as there was no thought about how much the effort would cost of war. This is no longer the proper way to act. Wars today are just drainers of human and natural resources, adding nothing more to humanity.
However, the idea of doing more and more with less provides a balanced and modern vision of our possibilities. The future will no longer be able to absorb immense individual fortunes, at the expense of the poverty of millions, nor the maintenance of the misery in which these potential consumers and new entrepreneurs find themselves.
Neither will the future allow the human race to continue to explore the planet of
predatory way with which we have done. We know today that natural resources are limited and that our world reserves of drinking water, mineral and energy resources, such as oil for example, will soon run out. Even today, with the incredible demand, it is becoming more and more expensive to explore new oil sheets and new natural deposits, since the difficulty of exploration has increased exponentially: new deposits are increasingly deeper and farther away, which demands more work, machinery and transport, making the final product. We must pay increasing attention to the recycling of industrial and
human beings, in order to avoid collapse, no matter how expensive it may be.
Together, each m2 of arable area will have to feed more and more mouths and not
we can afford to depend on weather and luck for that. We will have to choose: transform our pastures into agricultural fields and stop consuming meat, or improve the cultivation of animal tissue for food in factories and agricultural products on farms hydroponics.
The sea will not be able to help us either. In addition to being polluted, fish stocks are getting smaller and there is no hope that this will change in the short or medium term.
Therefore, despite the bleak picture, it will be up to human ingenuity and the increase of
resulting productivity, the survival of our species, and the possibility that there is some future for us and our society.
functional illiteracy
On 11/17/05, on a Thursday, in the program Attention Brazil broadcast by Cultura
FM, I heard an interview with Dr. José Aristodemo Pinotti, at the time Secretary of Education of São Paulo, who said that “there are many illiterate children in the 3rd grade”.
What appears to be a horror is actually far more common than it should:
Sunday, September 17, 2006, in the National Journal of O Estado de São Paulo, a
headline jumped out: “Illiteracy rate reduces pace of decline in Lula's government”. The author Fernando Dantas managed to make the crudity of this reality clear through real indices, obtained from sources such as the PNAD/IBGE:
According to the PNAD (National Household Sample Survey 2005), the
illiteracy has been declining, from 1992 to 2002, by 0.5% a year. In recent years, this drop was 0.3% per year, or “in absolute terms, there were 14.8 million illiterates in 2002 and, in 2005, this number had dropped to only 14.6 million”. The numbers are explained only by demographic variations, which implies that this 0.3% reduction per year is mainly due to the death of illiterate elderly people.
According to Dantas, “these results... are perplexing the government, which spent between 2003 and mid- 2005, a total of R$330 million to educate 3.4 million adults through the Brazil program Literate". One of the possibilities to explain such nonsense according to the matter would be, in the words of the Secretary of Continuing Education, Literacy and Diversity of the Ministry of Education, Ricardo Henriques, "that the program is attracting many functional illiterates, but that they are not absolute."
The Paulo Montenegro Institute (IPM), the social arm of Ibope, defines, according to the article in
Dantas, a functional literate person as the person "capable of using reading and writing to face the demands of your social context and use these skills to continue learning and developing throughout the life". The article also mentions that, in addition to not having precise statistics on the number of illiterates functional in Brazil, depending on the "concept accuracy" can be estimated a percentage of 25% to 75% of Brazilians. In other words, depending on the criterion adopted, Brazilian functional illiteracy can reach ¼ to ¾ of the country's population!
More recently, the newspaper Destak published an interview with the political scientist
Brazilian Alberto Carlos Almeida, author of the book A Cabeça do Brasileiro. In this interview, the political scientist states that “Brazilian society has the rulers it deserves” and categorically says that, “as Brazilians tolerate corruption, there are many scandals.” One of the main reasons mentioned by him for this tolerance is basically the low level of education, that is, "less instruction, less democracy". It is natural that the drop observed by the ILO in Brazilian productivity is a direct reflection of this sad scenario in which the Brazilian population finds itself.
The very environment in which Brazilians live does not encourage education. be it for the difficulties
of survival, which send an increasing contingent of young people into underemployment at the expense of education, or because of the immediacy in get results, which unfortunately can only be obtained in the long term, through solid and structured careers, the idea that goes on to young people, is that education makes no difference to the success of an individual, that is, that the so-called “school of life” is what really it works. And “success examples” are not uncommon and not very edifying... They combine laziness to learn formally, common in youth, with the neglect of society in general in relation to education, to deal with something which is fundamental and inherent to the human being - learning - as something superfluous, boring, which "will have no practical use" in the lives of people.
Many parents want their children to study, solely in order to obtain a piece of
role after a few years of formal study and “required” by society. With this, they hope that their children will have “a better life than theirs”. They are not very interested in the doors that the formal knowledge base can open for them, nor in the people their children can become. after acquiring the ability to enjoy learning new things and thinking for themselves, fundamental for the survival of beings humans. By encouraging these attitudes, Brazil continues to miss the chance to make a difference in a globalized world. It is at the mercy of dishonest politicians and businessmen, who use the ignorance of the masses to their advantage, as we are tired of reading, listening and seeing in the news.
The role of Youth and Adult Education (EJA) in the process of reversing this situation
Fortunately, this negative picture can and is being slowly reversed.
Faced with campaigns launched by international entities such as the V Conference
International on Adult Education - 1997 Confintea and others, countries are becoming aware of the need to eradicate illiteracy in the world so that the so desired increase in productivity and the dreamed of international competitiveness in an increasingly globalized world really occur.
At Confintea, the Hamburg Declaration on Adult Education advocates
essentially:
“...The effective participation of men and women in every sphere of life is a fundamental requirement for humanity to survive and face the challenges of the future.
2. Adult education, within this context, becomes more than a right: it is the key
for the 21st century; is both a consequence of exercising citizenship and a condition for
full participation in society. What's more, it's a powerful argument for
sustainable ecological development, democracy, justice, equality between
the sexes, socioeconomic and scientific development, in addition to being a requirement
fundamental for the construction of a world where violence gives way to dialogue and
culture of peace based on justice... (1999, p. 19)”
Current Brazilian efforts, in particular the Programa Brasil Alfabetizado, from 2003, are
the biggest that Brazil has done to eradicate illiteracy. These efforts, however, would be just a dead letter if there was no civil society participation. It is thanks to entities such as the Associação Alfabetização Solidária – ALFASOL, that this and other programs of interest to our society are able to be implemented. Founded 11 years ago, ALFASOL has stood out as a national model in Youth and Adult Education.
This type of teaching can and should be extended, from a methodological point of view, to
other existing modalities. With regard mainly to the use of the "life story" of its participants and, in its use in the learning process, EJA demonstrates successes similar to those obtained in the processes of ethnolearning. It is notorious that human knowledge is a ladder built on the rungs placed by our ethnic and/or cultural ancestors. Man does not need to reinvent the wheel every generation. But he can improve it.
One of the biggest problems faced by students, and I put myself in that
when I recall the initial difficulties with numbers and other concepts somewhat
abstract, is that each teacher's capacity to exemplify was what made us learn or not the given concepts. It was from my studies of Greek history that concepts such as that of the classical theorems became clearer. The fact of knowing how they lived and how they thought gave me a greater understanding of their calculations, which were unknown at the time I learned them, as I did not know their usefulness. In the same way, a teacher who does not master the cultural concepts of his students cannot, in most cases, make himself understood satisfactorily. Not because students are ignorant, far from it, but simply because their cultural reality is so different from the teacher's, that the two cannot speak the same language, even though she is the Portuguese. These are the so-called communication noises.
In the words of Ubiratan D'Ambrosio, professor of the Graduate Programs in History of Science and in Education Mathematics at PUC São Paulo: “Brazil stood out together with the United States, due to the potential of ethnomathematics in education. In line with the thought of Paulo Freire, she demonstrated that, in addition to the important research on mathematical knowledge and practice of various cultures, approached in the dimensions ethnographic, historical and epistemological of ethnomathematics, the pedagogical dimension is given equal importance, as it proposes an alternative to traditional education (2005, p. 9). ” The idea, therefore, is not to despise traditional academic knowledge, but rather to complement it when necessary, with a ethnological approach, in order to take advantage of the students' knowledge as feedback for the restructuring of the pedagogical concept used.
Thus, EJA, in addition to being an indispensable pedagogical model to win the
challenge of Brazilian illiteracy once and for all, can also be considered a basic methodology for the training of students and teachers for elementary and secondary levels. In this way, these teachers will be able to better understand and overcome their students' learning barriers. After all, what is wanted is for people to learn to learn. Only then can knowledge be multiplied and fully utilized. This is directly in line with the national interest in increasing productivity and
competitiveness of the country at the international level.
Bibliographic references
Bardhan, Pranab. Is Globalization Good or Bad for the Poor? Scientific American Brazil nº 48. São Paulo: Duetto Editorial. May 2006.
Capra, Fritjof. The Turning Point. São Paulo: Cultrix, 1995.
Cohen, David. Distant Equilibrium - Exam / The Company of the New Millennium. São Paulo: April,
2000.
Confintea. Hamburg Declaration – Agenda for the Future. Brasília: SESI/UNESCO, 1999.
D’Ambrosio, Ubiratan. Around the World in 80 Mathematics. Scientific American Brazil
Special Edition No. 11. São Paulo: Duetto Editorial. 2005.
Dantas, Fernando. Brazil Seeks Growth Revenue. The state of Sao Paulo. May 21, 2006.
_____. Illiteracy rate reduces the pace of decline in Lula's government. the State of São
Paul. September 17, 2006.
Drucker, Peter. Post-Capitalist Society, São Paulo: Pioneira, 1999.
Malthus, Thomas Robert. Essay on Population - The Economists. São Paulo: New
Cultural, 1996.
Sandroni, Paulo. Dictionary of Economics and Administration. São Paulo: Nova Cultural, 1996.
Saints, Fabio. Interview with political scientist Alberto Carlos Almeida. Featured 10 of
September 2007.
Internet sources
ILO / KILM - http://www.ilo.org/public/english/employment/strat/kilm/index.htm. ILO, 2005.
ISO 14000 – Environmental Management. www.cnpma.embrapa.br. ISO, 2000.
By Henrique Montserrat Fernandez
Columnist Brazil School
Economy - Brazil School
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/economia/a-eja-sua-participacao-no-crescimento-produtividade-.htm
