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The Expansion of Education: A Brazilian Case Study

The Brazilian educational system has expanded rapidly in the years since 1940. The enrollment rate among children between the ages of 5 and 14 has more than doubled, increasing from 25.5 percent to 57.5 percent of the cohort. The rate of expansion in the Brazilian educational system has not been constant across time, however, nor has it affected the various regions of the country uniformly. The percentage of school-aged children enrolled in school in Brazil declined slightly in the 1940s, and the rate of growth in succeeding decades varied between 5.5 percent per year in the 1950s and 0.3 percent per year in the 1970s. In states with initially low levels of enrollment, the rate of enrollment increased by more than 200 percent between 1940 and 1980, but wide disparities in enrollment rates across states and regions persisted at the end of the period. This paper examines the growth of school enrollments in Brazil in the years between 1940 and 1980. The first section of this paper reviews some recent theoretical frameworks that have been put forward for the study of educational expansion. The second section assesses the power of two diffusion hypotheses to account for the observed pattern of expansion in the Brazilian case. The third section discusses the interrelations among public policy, social change, and educational expansion in Brazil in the past 4 decades. The final section of this paper examines the pattern of associations between changes in enrollment rates and several other indicators of social and economic change in the Brazilian states.