Paulo Renato Souza Archive Guide
Donated in 2014 to Fundação FHC, the Paulo Renato Souza Archive reflects his professional career, especially when he was Minister of Education during the two terms of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002). The Guide focuses on the documents generated during this period.
Trajectory
Born on September 10, 1945, in Porto Alegre (RS), Paulo Renato Souza graduated in Economics from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), obtained a master’s degree from the Universidad de Chile and a doctorate from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp), where he was professor and rector between 1986 and 1990. He has held various public positions, including operations manager at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington, D.C. from 1991 to 1994, secretary of education for the state of São Paulo (1984-1986 and 2009-2010) and federal deputy (2006-2009).
Responsible for centralizing Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s government plan when he was running for president, Souza set up a participatory system that allowed for the inclusion of ideas from state committees made up of PSDB activists and technicians, who proposed solutions for all sectors of public life. The members of the central committee, in Brasilia, analyzed the proposals that would later make up the government plan entitled ‘Mãos à Obra’, launched in August 1994.
In January 1995, Paulo Renato Souza was sworn in as Minister of Education and remained in office until the end of 2002. His main task was to mobilize society around the importance of the area for the country’s development and the need for measures to raise the quality of Brazilian education.
At the Ministry of Education
In ‘A revolução gerenciada’ (The managed revolution), a book published in 2005, Paulo Renato Souza reported that the adoption of a strategic plan as a working method was fundamental to the success of the projects developed by the MEC under his management. This is how, back in 1995, he launched the ‘Acorda Brasil, está na hora da Escola’ campaign, the first initiative to mobilize society for the interventions that were to follow.
It was necessary to guarantee universal access for students to primary education, mobilizing stable and exclusive financial resources to combat the high dropout rates at this stage of schooling. In 1996, the new Guidelines and Bases Law (LDB) was approved, which established, among other impact measures, places for all students between the ages of 7 and 14. Also in 1996, Souza created the Fund for the Maintenance and Development of Primary Education and the Valorization of the Teaching Profession (FUNDEF), which provided municipalities with the resources to improve teacher pay, school infrastructure, the purchase of teaching materials and the provision of transportation for students.
Programs developed
To improve the mechanisms that would make it possible to diagnose the country’s educational situation, in 1996 he introduced the National Examination of Courses (ENC), known as the “Provão“, aimed at entrants and graduates of higher education schools. The following year, he introduced changes to the Basic Education Assessment System (SAEB), which also covered secondary education. In 1998, the National High School Exam (Enem) was finally instituted.
Among the policies aimed at higher education during his administration were those that encouraged university autonomy (1996); those that gave rise to the Higher Education Student Financing Fund (FIES), in 1999, aimed at low-income students enrolled in private institutions; those that sought to remedy problems with facilities and equipment, such as the ‘Programa de Modernização e Consolidação da Infra-Estrutura Acadêmica das Instituições Federais de Ensino Superior e Hospitais Universitários’; and those that combated inequalities, such as the ‘Diversidade na Universidade’ Programme, in 2002.
Implemented in 2001, the Bolsa Escola Federal offered low-income people conditions to prevent children from being diverted from their studies in order to contribute to the family budget through their work.
Archive
In the archive, made up of documents of different genres, you can find elements that express Paulo Renato Souza’s work as a public man. Among the textual documentation, diagnoses, programs, projects and reports from the Ministry of Education stand out, among those that record the repercussions of his initiatives in the written press. The photographic reports that covered events associated with educational policy – visits to schools, hearings, inaugurations and many others – form a set as significant as the opinions, pronouncements, speeches and manifestos defending principles. There are also recordings of commercials, jingles, interviews and testimonies.