Public/Private

Yesterday, we spent most of the day at Elefante Brancho, one of the best public schools in the city of Brasilia.  We did classroom observations, talked with faculty and staff, interacted with the students, took a class tour, and even wound up in their auditorium in front of a packed house of teachers and students answering eager questions about everything from teacher salaries to how political our student organizations were.  The students of Elefante Brancho (which does indeed mean White Elephant) were just like my own students back home, bright and intelligent, interested in their friends and popular music, in love with their cell phones.  It felt so familiar despite the linguistic barrier.

The teachers were a little apologetic about their school.  It was built a long time ago, and things here and there might have shown that.  To me, though, coming from a school built in 1938, what I saw instead was how well they have taken what they have and made it attractive and student-centered.  While they have security cameras in the halls for safety, they also have beautiful murals on the walls spray painted by students.  Student art was everywhere:  collage, paintings, drawings glued to doors.  The students could feel real ownership.  It was something that was theirs, not simply a facility they were passing through.  They were also given time to decompress, breaks in which they were not herded from place to place, but rather given time to talk, use their cell phones, be more like adults.  To me, this was reflected in their behavior.

Today, we visited the Marista high school, one of the two best private schools here in Brasilia.  It was astounding.  I have seen colleges with worse campuses.  Everything was bright and clean, airy and well-kept.     It was very obvious that money had been spent on its maintenance.  Nothing was ornate or ostentatious, but the science labs were stocked with computers even we don't have. The teachers were happy, satisfied, had been competitive to get in, in fact.  The students were engaged, active, curious about us.  We talked with their student government leaders, visited with their lead teachers.  Again and again, they spoke to us of the importance of building relationships with their students to ensure they could be academically successful.

Both the public and the private school teachers talked to us about the disparity between the experience teaching and attending a public school versus a private one.  It came up again and again.  Looking back through my pictures, although I can definitely see the differences in the facilities, when I look at the students and think about our experiences with them, all I can see, to be honest, are faces of bright young Brazilians who want to find the best for themselves and their country.  That foundation of similarity is a strong thing to build upon no matter what school created it.