Elie Ghanem

Elie Ghanem is using his extensive experience and passion for learning to reinvent the public education system in Brazil. His idea mobilizes community forces and makes all those involved in the education process stakeholders in creating goal-oriented education plans that meet their local needs.

Elie is implementing a system that joins a diverse group of educating agents: teachers, family members, community leaders, citizen sector organizations, students, and public authorities, in constructing a participative and strategic plan for education. The process redirects public education from using traditional, outdated information by creating new sets of knowledge that respond to the real needs of the population. Schools and communities begin to deal with issues like public security, inequality, unemployment, corruption, domestic struggles, and the structural mechanisms that reinforce them. Members of the community become enabled decision-makers, creating their own plans for the kind of education they want and need. Elie's idea is making a leap in democratizing education in Brazil by helping stakeholders construct effective forms of social organization and mobilization, changing social relationships, influencing centers of power, and understanding and integrating themselves into the economy.

Despite numerous initiatives from government and private sectors to keep kids in school, involve families in the classroom, and train teachers, the Brazilian education system continues to produce alarming rates of failure. Fifteen million Brazilians above the age of 15 are illiterate; 21 percent of them are between the ages of 15 and 30. In this age group, 29 percent studied for a period of less than four years and have difficulty understanding what they read, earning the referral of "functional illiterates." According to a study by IBGE (Brazilian Institute on Geography and Statistics, 2001) in 1999, 73 percent of 14-year-olds were behind a grade or more for their age. More than 95 percent of children enter school but the majority are held back or expelled.
The numbers add up to a fundamental problem. The current education system in Brazil is born out of an outdated model. It is based on the concept that to be productive citizens, everyone must assimilate a "legitimate" set of knowledge. The school becomes a transmitter of knowledge and the teacher a mere instructor. This model, based on the idea of equality, has made an important contribution historically in terms of providing "education for all," compared with previous concepts offering exclusive education. However, the "education for all" model inhibits innovative teaching and negates social participation in decisions about school education. Therefore, the current model contributes to a new form of exclusion because it fails to address the populations' basic needs. It fails to prepare citizens to redefine social and political relationships, influence centers of power, integrate themselves into the economy, or construct efficient forms of social organization and mobilization. Moving beyond education for all, today's society demands education relevant to all.
Schools and teachers remain isolated from other educating agents including parents, media, government authorities, and community leaders. As one-way instructors, teachers become out of touch with the real needs of those who are supposed to be learning from them. Adding to the problem, information technology and mass communication increase the speed and volume of "knowledge" available, making it harder to discern what is important to learn. Furthermore, the division of government entities dealing separately with education, health, security, employment, housing, and other social issues, contributes to the lack of dialogue between educating agents.
In order for education to respond to the needs of the student, teachers can no longer be restricted to the task of "giving class." They must participate in the concept of educational practices, in constant dialogue with their peers (learners, families, citizen organizations, and public organs) and at the center of the decision making process about the future of education. The fight for teachers' rights and professional development has been led by unions who have largely reduced the problems of schools and their teachers to a question of wages and labor rights, instead of a problem of the type of education being delivered. Until unions, school technical staff, and teachers become involved in designing and directing a more effective form of education, the problems of low-pay, poor job security, and lack of preparation will not be solved.
Only recently have the principles of the World Declaration of Education for All begun to be circulated throughout Brazil, 10 years after 155 countries signed the document. This document broadens the concept of education from teaching children in schools to learning linked to satisfying the basic needs of the population. However, there is a great need for new proposals and innovative initiatives to put these principles in practice.

Elie is implementing his idea for creating a system of education that responds to the needs of the population by bringing together students, families, education professionals, and citizen sector organizations for discussion. He carries out his strategy from a strong base of support through the organization Ação Educativa, helping to build community extension programs of the University of São Paulo. Elie uses this position to mobilize and direct the work of seven citizen sector organizations and educational institutions, each with its own role and responsibility. Together, the organizations direct their work along three fronts of action.
The first goal is to increase the influence of students and family in matters of school education. Elie provides assistance and capacity-building for educators to create and implement activities that promote dialogue and involve different groups in the decisions about education in the schools. Elie's focus is on the teacher, but his point of entry is working with the technical staff of public schools. Elie realizes that teachers are underpaid and overworked, and additional "training" for teachers only adds to this burden if administrations do not understand how to maximize teachers time and support them in educational innovations. Therefore, Elie works with principals and technical staff of schools to change the professional and creative environment for teachers. He provides educators with information so they can have a collective impact on what is carried out in schools and involve other employees, students, and families in the educational decisions. This assistance supports direct participative educational planning in four municipal schools (three primary and one preschool) and one state school.
The second front is to reconstruct interpersonal and intergroup relationships between educating agents and students. Working with community cultural groups, Elie promotes educational activities designed to stimulate artistic skills and social interaction for students, teachers, and other members of the community. The activities introduce themes of social importance in the form of theater, music, choreography, and fine arts. They increase the use of the libraries, computer labs, and public school auditoriums, turning the venues into places for forming and bringing together local cultural producers.
The third line of action builds on the other activities and is aimed at regional education reform by joining educating agents from schools, citizen sector organizations, and public agencies. The variety of processes and activities Elie is developing involves 450 teachers and 12,000 students directly in six schools of 10 districts in the East Zone of São Paulo. The total population of the region is near four million. To make the leap to regional education transformation, Elie has mobilized the East Zone Education Forum that deals with themes of educational policies with teachers, students, and community leaders in order to create the first participative Educational Plan to be implemented by the educating agents themselves. Through a process that has taken two years, Elie has worked with educators from this poor and highly populated region of São Paulo to create their own education plan with objectives, measures, and mechanisms for implementation. The plan, which has recently been finalized, calls for a mixed commission of government bodies, educators, and citizen organizations to create a more effective system of education for their communities.
Elie's plan is to recreate this process of participative education planning in other regions across São Paulo and in other cities throughout Brazil to promote systematic change in the country's education system. To spread his idea, Elie recognizes the need to prepare and train facilitators to support processes for reorienting school practices and relationships between educating agents. He has negotiated with the Department of Education of the University of São Paulo to carry out this capacity building among university students and to enlist these facilitators to provide service as a part of university-community extension programs.
Within four years, Elie plans to replicate his idea in other state capitals in the Southeast region of Brazil including Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. Within eight years, he plans to bring this experience to a capital city in the Northeast (Recife, Pernambuco) and one in the North region (Belém, Pará). Elie has already established contact with citizen sector organizations, universities, and professionals of government agencies that he plans to bring together to spread his work.

During the years of authoritarian government and military regimes in Brazil, 16 year-old Elie joined the leftist militancy to mobilize high school students in the fight for freedom of expression and the right to organization. From this moment, he became committed to developing more democratic and participating educational policies that would address the reality of those "being educated." He found inspiration in his sister, a doctor, and an activist in the fight for democracy.
While studying pedagogy at the University of São Paulo, Elie interned at the Sector for Auxiliary Institutions for the Secretary of Education of São Paulo. A year later, he was put in charge of this sector and was responsible for stimulating the development of school boards, teacher-parent associations, and school civic centers. Two years later when a conservative mayor dissolved the sector, Elie moved to the other side of the educational system and began teaching in primary and secondary public schools. The serious problems he encountered with poorly prepared students, lack of resources, and isolation pushed him to investigate problems in the system and identify possible solutions. He began conducting a series of studies on social and educational movements. He then began to develop and experiment with new proposals for the professional development of teachers, introduce debate in the classroom, and modify the way universities teach education. During his trajectory that joined learning, study, and practice, Elie published works including Popular Fights, Management and Quality of Public Education, and School Education and Democracy in Brazil. In 1994 he participated in the creation of Ação Educativa and has used that base ever since to create and implement new initiatives.