Aprendizado e Seleção: uma análise da evolução educacional brasileira de acordo com uma perspectiva de ciclo de vida

The objective of this text is to analyze the main trends of the last 20 years keeping inmind two important characteristics of the Brazilian educational system: selection and stratification by age. All educational systems are divided into cycles that, grosso modo, correspond to age groups. In addition, all educational systems have two main objectives: teaching and selecting. A peculiarity of the Brazilian system is that its main selection mechanism, massive grade repetition, distorts the age profile of its students so that educational cycles no longer correspond to specific ages. For this reason, the text attempts to always look at education from the points of view of both cycles andage groups. After an introduction summarizing the main demographic trend of the last 30 to 20 years, the text analyzes three types of indicator: access represented by netenrollment rates, the impacts of repetition as represented by age-grade distortion, andlearning as represented by the results of standardized testing. The objective is toalways analyze both means and dispersions, due to the strong inequality of ourcountry. The mains conclusions are that, in spite of the important educational achievement that was the universalization of access, the Brazilian educational process still leads to low attainment and achievement in levels as well as to reproduction of theine qualities present in Brazilian society. The text ends with a series of policy challenges that go from universalization of pre-school in urban areas to the adjustment of young adult and higher education supply to their demand.