Cuba located right next door that can send their surplus doctors to help treat their residents for various aliments.

suffering too. There are similar steps in the US to attempt to make schooling more affordable in the US too. Will bear watching closely to see if these effects help.

Education is free in Brazil, and literacy exceeds 90%

Like most Latin American countries an advanced degree is attainable to all, and all prospective doctors must provide 2 years of service in under served areas to be licensed.

But, if Lula or Dilma were in power and not in prison for corruption you would be singing a different tune.

Agence France-Presse

Brazil's 'educational apartheid' cements inequality early in life

GlobalPost

January 17, 2013 · 12:15 PM UTC
By John Otis

Comparing the Divide: Education lies at the heart of inequality — economic and racial — in America and around the world. As the US approaches Martin Luther King Day, two cities still struggling to learn that lesson are Rio de Janeiro and Selma, Alabama. These two cities, which share a history of both economic and racial inequality, also share a close ranking for economic inequality on the Gini Index: 0.523 (Selma) and 0.519 (Brazil).

RIO DE JANEIRO — One of Rio de Janeiro’s finest private schools, the Colegio Teresiano is surrounded by tropical rainforest. Brazilian poetry and novels by Gabriel Garcia Marquez fill the library. Florid works of naïve art decorate the hallways.

This resplendent setting provides an intellectual jump start for children of middle and upper-class families who can afford the $700-a-month tuition. 2011 World Bank stats puts annual per capita GDP in Brazil at $11,640, or $970 per month. That’s why it’s jarring to find an 11-year-old slum-dweller wearing the Teresiano’s blue-and-white uniform.

The student, fifth-grader Lucas Junior, hails from Rocinha, a mountaintop ghetto, or “favela,” whose red-brick shacks are visible from the Teresiano school’s top-floor balcony and where many people get by on a few dollars a day. In Rocinha, public schools are overcrowded and lessons are sometimes interrupted by drug shootouts. But Lucas sidestepped that dead-end scenario because his father works at the Teresiano as a hall monitor and family scholarships are an employee benefit.

“My son is learning things here that kids don’t learn until two years later in public school,” said Adilson Junior, 34, while taking a break in the school snack bar. “Lucas has a golden opportunity. But all children should have this opportunity and an equal shot at success.”

An equal shot. That was the holy grail for 19th century US school reformer Horace Mann, who promoted equality in schools as the key to upward mobility for the lower rungs of society. One of the earliest advocates of universal public education, Mann lobbied for public schools to bring children of all social classes together in order to give them a common learning experience.

But in Brazil, a rising global power which sees itself as a peer of the United States, many experts say the two-tiered education system accentuates the country’s huge gap between rich and poor. Despite recent improvements, in 2009 Brazil scored 0.557 in the Gini Index, which placed it as the world’s tenth most unequal nation. In 2012, the Gini coefficient for Brazil was 0.519, according to the CIA World Factbook.

More:
https://www.pri.org/stories/2013-01-17/brazils-educational-apartheid-cements-inequality-early-life

There are private schools all over the world. Just because Biff Trustfund goes to Eton doesn't mean that Johnny Q. Public can't get a decent education. If Biff wants to go to his private school, I'm OK with it, so long as his parents are paying into a public paradigm.

Lifting Johnny up doesn't require knocking Biff down. Or do you disagree?