Keywords

Arguing modern nation-states to have risen on the shoulders of formal education from kindergarten to higher education would be no exaggeration. Thus, nation-states could have been able to construct national identities using compulsory education by having all their citizens learn national symbols (e.g., national anthems) by heart and why they should have self-pride through daily and annual national ceremonies. However, earlier state formations whether tribal or imperial, gave neither attention to nor concern for public education, as education and literacy were simply meant mostly as a matter for the elites (i.e., high culture). Today, one can mention several types of literacy such as media or finance; at the same time, the length of mandatory education has globally become K12 across the board practically, and lifetime learning has become a daily routine for most. One can easily argue the citizens of modern nation-states to have become people of letters, seeing as how formal education has become not only compulsory but also free through the provision of the relatively generous taxes of the bourgeoisie who are in need of educated workers to comprehend more easily how machines are assembled. Essentially, education has functioned as an elevator lifting developing countries to the level of developed ones as well as converting ordinary individuals into elites within their own societies.

The twenty-first century has witnessed a considerable number of countries transform from developing countries to emerging markets. Primarily determined by economic factors, these rises in status highlight both the divisions within the Global South and the similarities among these emerging countries. In this way, Turkey and Brazil have been counted among these in the twenty-first century due to their economic growth, development levels, and increasing visibility in the international system. In addition to their current status, the two countries also share commonalities in their historical past with regard to their historical engagement in the global economy as multicultural empires during the nineteenth century. The establishment of a republic as a political regime in Brazil in 1889 and in Turkey in 1923 was both marked with the specific goals of modernization and participation in the league of modern countries, as well as to even “surpass the level of contemporary civilization” in the words of Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic (İnan, 1970, p. 217). However, the idealized condition of modernity for both countries was linked more to the success of efforts in nation-building as well as societal and cultural transformation than economic goals in the early years of their new political regimes. Both the motto of the Brazilian national flag (Ordem e Progresso [order and progress]) and Atatürk’s goal cited above are zealous reflections of the late modernization efforts imitating the European model of so-called enlightenment.

Nevertheless, the political economic context soon started to change and efforts were made to reorganize social life in many aspects in parallel with the top-down modernization authoritarian efforts with even a totalitarian blend. Interestingly, the prioritization of import substituting industrialization during most of the twentieth century for both countries has catalyzed such transformations with regard to authentic values paying attention to national industrialization. The preliminary idea of modernizing their societies, including economic development goals, in the minds of the founding fathers and their top bureaucrats has unsurprisingly continuously affected the educational policies of both countries. Alongside the responsibility of transforming their educational systems in tandem with their novel political goals in the Platonic sense of raising virtuous citizens, these countries also had to face challenges stemming from the task of achieving economic development as their number one priority.

In accordance with the modernization and concomitant development goals of both countries imitating mainly the Western European states, civilized Europe had been the role model. Thus, education as the ideological state apparatus in Althusser (1970) sense became the available toolbox for societal reconstruction while transferring from the ancient regime to the new order. Thus, the idea of educational reform became the new ethos for the changing political elites in these countries. However, the ideological differences that had mostly led to political instability in the form of military interventions and/or fundamental changes in constitutions have resulted in a complexity while designing and implementing such educational reforms. The economic problems encountered by Turkey and Brazil in the second half of the twentieth century resulted as an overall change in their economic policies starting from the early 1980s. This neoliberal shift not only changed their economies but also resulted in profound effects on the provision of public services and social expectations. Thus, such huge transformations have also brought their own challenges: Rapid but unplanned urbanization resulting as shantytowns, high and chronic unemployment, and even acute competition among city gangs have brought excessive security problems for ordinary people in the case of Brazil. Consequently, these changes in parallel with the increasing economic globalization have forced the need for reform, particularly in education, a reform in accordance with not only the needs of the state and citizens but also the demands of the economic sectors. This trend has remained intact for the first two decades of the twenty-first century through increases in economic growth, the greater expectations of the population, and the need to catch up with high-tech advancements. Thus, the education of not only students but also adults for a competitive economy, the presence of assertive foreign policy goals, and the contemporaneous prospects of leading politicians have all shaped the framework of educational reforms.

Without omitting the differences between Turkey and Brazil, the historical, political, societal, and economic similarities discussed above have affected the very idea of educational reforms in both countries for more than a century. This provides a suitable and meaningful basis of comparison while discussing the differences between developing countries and emerging powers regarding educational reform through a variety of requirements, means, and goals. Within this framework, this chapter discusses the recent educational reforms in Turkey and Brazil. The first section explains the root ideas of educational reform and their close connection with the notion of these countries’ status as developing countries. The second and third sections evaluate the current implementations of educational reforms and prospects respective of these countries with a brief introduction to the history of their educational reforms. Lastly, we compare how both countries have approached educational reform in the twenty-first century in terms of their commonalities and differences through challenges they have encountered so far and of their responses in the form of their educational reforms and prospects for the future.

Educational Reform and Development Nexus

Despite the revolutionary ideas that reform as a word rises in the mind, educational reform is a continuous task mainly identified with ceaselessly improving the quality of education. Accordingly, the discussion on educational reform from the very beginning revolves around the question of how to improve (Hacsi, 2003, p. 1). While reforms can be made at several levels from curriculum to schooling (e.g., at the elementary, secondary, and high school levels or geographical-administrative levels from local to national), the hardest task is to achieve success at the system level (Holliday & Clark, 2010, p. 40).

The idea of educational reform in contemporary developing societies cannot be evaluated separately from the developmental goals of their respective states. Most of the time, educational reform is regarded as a complementary part of overall reform programs. Moreover, depending on the ideological orientation and geographical/socio-cultural conditions of developing countries, these educational reforms may have country-specific goals such as prioritizing the schooling of girls, preventing adolescent boys from dropping out in rural areas, or promoting the cultural sustainability of societies in small island-states (Vaka’uta, 2016, p. 10). Thus, in accordance with the differences in their vision of development, priorities in the realm of educational reform may vary from country to country or from local government to central government within the same country. In this context, the goals of educational reforms can be discussed under the following sections: human-centered goals, material capability-centered goals, and ideology-centered goals. The determinant position of ideological goals is open to debate, but they surely have oriented and reoriented the roadmap for decision makers by encountering questions such as reform for whom, how should the curriculum be designed, and which values should be highlighted. However, in the contemporary world, educational reform proposals mostly focus on improving human competences to increase the quality of education, both targeting the human factor (e.g., students and educators; (Fullan, 2007, p. 5) and improving material capabilities in order to support the human factor. In the last instance, the human factor is the basis of educational improvement as education involves humanizing people, namely the process of perfecting them.

Educational Systems in Turkey and Brazil

Covering around 785,347 km2 and exceeding 82 million people with per capita GDP of $9225 (World Bank, 2020a) Turkey is a mid-sized country in terms of territorial area, demographics, and economic indicators. In contrast, with a territorial size around 8.5 million km2 and a population exceeding 212 million people (Instituto Brasileiro da Geografia y Estatística, 2020), Brazil is essentially the largest country in South America and one of the largest in the world in terms of size and population. Even though Brazil is a BRICS member and among the 10 largest economies in the world, it has a mid-sized economy with respect to its per capita GDP of $8717 (World Bank, 2020b). With its federal system, Brazil differs from Turkey, as the federal government mainly determines Brazilian educational policies while local governments enjoy a limited freedom on how these policies are determined and implemented. The high level of population density in the southern and south-eastern states with the contrastingly scattered population profile on the northern coast and many interior states also reveal the need for adopting varying educational policies.

Just like in Brazil, education in Turkey is a fundamental constitutional right. In accordance with the unitary state system, the central government is responsible for providing financial resources for educational expenses, and Turkey’s Ministry of National Education (MoNE) is responsible for managing the educational system by means of formal and non-formal education both in public and private schools. Formal education is free of charge in Turkish public schools from pre-primary to tertiary education; private schools are also allowed to operate in all stages of education. The length of compulsory education was extended to 12 years in 2012 and is divided into the three consecutive 4-year phases of primary school, middle school, and high school educational institutions. Two distance education mechanisms are also found: Open Education Middle Schools and Open Education High Schools for students unable to attend formal educational institutions that provide face-to-face education or for those who exceed the age limits of the formal education stages (MoNE, 2020, pp. xiv–xv). In Turkey, MoNE also manages non-formal education. During the twentieth century, nation-states had already benefited from non-formal education to eradicate illiteracy, to educate the population on various issues, and to support adults in completing their compulsory education. Today, non-formal education still performs a very secondary task while mainly providing courses in various fields for adults to improve their skills and in particular encouraging them to adopt the changes technological developments bring.

Compulsory formal education in Brazil lasts for 14 consecutive years and involves pre-primary for the 4–5 age group, primary for the 6–10 age group, and secondary for the 11–17 age group. The total number of students in the compulsory school-age population and in non-compulsory higher education surpasses approximately 51 million (UNESCO Institute for Statistics [UIS], 2020a). Formal compulsory education is free of charge in Brazil, as are public universities apart from low entrance fees. Private educational institutions also function at all levels in the country.

Both countries primarily determine entrance into tertiary education through university entrance exams. Turkey conducts the multistage university entrance examination with the Measuring, Selection, and Placement Center (Ölçme, Seçme ve Yerleştirme Merkezi [ÖSYM]). Annual classroom assessments during the high school stage also contribute to how final scores are calculated in order to determine the program and institution in which students are placed (Kitchen et al., 2019, pp. 129, 175). The administration of public higher education is mainly funded by the central government (60%) with a small portion from student contributions (4%); public higher education institutions are also allowed to generate income through variable contributions. Higher education is conducted under the supervision of Turkey’s Council of Higher Education (Yüksek Öğretim Kurulu [YÖK]). Turkey currently has 209 universities. Even though 78 are foundational institutions, 95% of the university students enrolled in degree programs at various levels is enrolled in public institutions (All About Turkey, 2020). Turkey has no private universities in the American sense as the foundational institutions are literally backed by a foundation and are not allowed to profit from their higher educational services. Turkish universities also operate a non-formal type of higher education through their Continuous Education Centers offering courses for various degrees or certificates.

The total number of students from pre-primary to tertiary education in Turkey exceeds 26 million (UIS, 2020b). Student enrollment rates for the 2015–2020 period appear as 98% at the compulsory level for the 6–9 and 10–13 age groups and has risen from 85% in 2015 to 89% in 2020 for the 14–17 age group. Turkey’s formal education statistics also reveal a less than 1% difference between the enrollment rates for male and female students in the 6–9 and 10–13 age groups in favor of males and an approximately 1% difference between the enrollment rates for male and female students in the 14–17 age group (MoNE, 2020, p. 1). The statistics also reveal participation in non-compulsory pre-schooling to have constantly increased as a result of MoNE’s efforts, already having risen to 75% in 2020 from 67% in 2015 for the age 5 group (MoNE, 2020, p. 1). According to data from 2017, the number of illiterate people still exceeds two million in Turkey (UIS, 2020b). By 2020, the net enrollment rate in tertiary education in Turkey was 43.3%, with enrollment for male students being 6% lower than for females (MoNE, 2020, p. 1). Consequently, when taking all numbers into consideration, one may easily understand why improving educational quality currently stands as an important task for all governments in the world. The latest data about Brazil’s net enrollment rate is from 2018. The pre-primary enrollment rate in 2018 exceeded 86%, with 96.3% enrollment for primary education and 85% for secondary education (UIS, 2020a). In contrast with many developing countries, enrollment rates by gender for secondary and tertiary education are higher for female students. But thanks to efforts at bridging this gap, the male enrollment rate in secondary education increased from 74.7% in 2011 to 83.6% in 2018; however, this is still 3% below the female enrollment rate (UIS, 2020a). The enrollment rate in tertiary education for the 18–22 age group was 43.5% in 2011, with male enrollment being more than 11% below the female enrollment rate (UIS, 2020a). By 2017, government expenditures on education were 16.5% of total government expenditures (UIS, 2020a). Although dropping annually, the number of illiterate people in Brazil is still quite high at more than 11 million which is roughly equal to the 5% of Brazilian population (UIS, 2020a) compared to other middle-sized economies in the globe.

Historical Background of Educational Reforms

The historical antecedents to educational reform attempts in modern Turkey can be traced back to the late Ottoman era; modern educational methods even started being adopted around the seventeenth century (Zaim, 1987, p. 490). The early reforms in the Ottoman Empire firstly appeared in the reorganization of the military to defeat infidels on the battlefield and then disseminated into civil bureaucratic institutions for promoting industrialization. Nevertheless, the modernization of education was a parcel of reforms in various fields in which the goal was to compete with the rapidly advancing European countries.

The educational reforms during the first decades of the Republic of Turkey were influenced by the desire to redesign the cultural orientation of society through top-down modernization (i.e., autocratic Westernization). Such policies had profound effects on the social, cultural, and intellectual lives of the war-ravaged society in many aspects. The education-related reforms of the early Republican Era can be listed as the Integration of Education Law (1924), adoption of the Latin alphabet (1928), organization of the university education system (1933), and launch of specific policies and establishment of novel institutions in the realms of fine art, historical, and linguistic studies (Republic of Turkey, Ministry of Culture and Tourism [KTB], 2020).

In the heydays from the Latinization of alphabet to the dress codes for female teachers (Yılmaz, 2013, p. 15), the schools in the young Turkish Republic made sure its youth embraced the revolutionary values imposed by the new political regime that was ordering a wide and ambitious socio-political reform agenda. Meanwhile in Brazil, while the idea of educational reform had been seen as crucial since the establishment of the Republic in 1889, no consensus was found regarding the priorities. Positivists, anarchists, the Catholic Church, and local actors were all involved in the debates regarding education in the early decades of the Republic (Meirelles, 2013). Slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1888 in just such a revolutionary context, one year before the proclamation of the Republic. Thus, the main goal of the new leaders was to challenge the elitist and slavery-based social order of the country’s imperial past in which access to education had been quite limited to the privileged social classes. However, a great deal of autonomy and responsibility in financing the educational system were delivered to local governments through the 1891 Constitution (Cury, 2010, pp. 155–156). Thus, the diversified socio-economic and geographical conditions of the states and the federal structure led to differences among local-level policies from the very beginning. For a more centralized but contradictory approach to educational reform as part and parcel of nation-building, Brazil had to wait until the Vargas administration of the 1930s.

The Republican Era in Turkey is also a history of ups and downs by means of democracy. Thus, important turning points such as the abolishment of the one-party system and the military interventions of 1960 and 1980 had profound and sometimes contradictory effects on the educational system design through reforms (Zaim, 1987, pp. 490–491). Despite the consolidation and quality of education still being debated, democracy in Turkey has remained uninterrupted since the military coup in 1980. However, the contemporary educational system in Turkey, despite several revisions over the years, is based on the 1982 Constitution and the policies adopted after this military coup. Moreover, the 1980s was the decade of a neoliberal shift for Turkey and paved the way for economic transformation in particular, marking the neoliberal route in many aspects for the decades to come. Thus, according to İnal and Akkaymak (2012, pp. xiii, xiv), while the educational reforms of the early Republic firstly aimed for structural amendments in the realm of education, the second step resulted from a process beginning in 1970s that lasted around three decades and restructured the educational system in accordance with the requirements of the neoliberal policies that had started in Britain and the USA and then spread globally.

Consequently, when taking the political tensions among the youth into consideration and the challenges brought by the global economy such as oil crises during the 1970s, as well as the necessity to compete with developed economies, Turkey’s national education policy became an indispensable part of national development plans. According to the 5-year development plan made after the 1980 coup, “The human factor [was described as] the most important factor of our national wealth [and had to be] evaluated in a maximum (productive) way through education and used as the main tool in development,” with a specific emphasis on the need to improve the quality of education (Zaim, 1987, p. 508). The early 1980s witnessed both the oppressive policies designed by the military decision makers and the opening of a new phase for Turkey by means of defining ambitious developmental goals that had implications on educational policies. Islam was welcomed as part of the national curriculum under the course of Religious Culture and Moral Knowledge, in which students had to memorize passages from the Qur’an as well as the Prophet’s sayings (Hadiths). The era saw the rise of the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis, which underlined that the Turkish identity whether in an ethnic or national sense could not be dismantled from Islam. Meanwhile, the 1990s were stigmatized by highly ideological discussions on the interpretation of secularism in the realm of education. This resulted in a series of counter-reforms such as the headscarf ban and the reorganization of the compulsory schooling system to avoid the practice of memorizing from the Qur’an, as some families were going to send their children to centers for learning the Qur’an by heart after primary school. In fact, the coup leaders wanted to exploit Islam as a moderating issue to prevent youth from internalizing leftist and rightist ideologies while at the same time keeping Islam as nothing more than folklore.

Regarding the situation in Brazil during the twentieth century, the main concern of the nation-building project during the Vargas governmentsFootnote 1 was based on controlling various aspects of social life. This was built on pillars such as re-embracing the country’s imperial past, providing the necessary workforce for the ambitious industrial development program, and legitimating the regime’s centralizing authority (de Medeiros, 2020, p. 835). The period between Vargas’ death in 1954 and the military coup in 1964 a decade later was marked by the ideological disputes of the Cold War politics with profound effects not only on Brazil but also on other developing countries including Turkey. The Brazilian military regime (1964–1985) in many aspects continued Vargas’ political and economic program of suppressing political movements and civil society.

When the democratization process restarted in the 1980s, Brazil had fallen behind many middle-income countries in rankings regarding the life quality in parallel with the rising debt crisis of Latin American countries. The very low school enrollment rates had to be tackled before reforming the system as a priority in 1980s. This approach can be interpreted as a continuation of the illiteracy eradication policy promoted by the former military government. The 1980s was a decade of democratization after the military government as well as of an economic transformation toward neoliberal policies in tandem with the global rise of neoliberalism. Such profound changes both exacerbated and revealed economic inequalities while making room for civil society to raise its voice and take the required actions as much as possible, at least in regard to attracting the government’s attention about education.

Civil society, business circles, and international organizations have worked hand in hand with the federal and local governments to address the relationship educational problems have with the issues of poverty, homelessness, high crime rates, and drug-addiction. They all developed specific projects to encourage school enrollment while improving students’ living and studying conditions at home and in school. Consequently, a long-term successful partnership model emerged between Brazil and UNESCO in addition to its ongoing public-civic collaborations (da Silva & de Andrade, 2009; Milana, 2017). Through its own resources and international funding, Brazil has successfully reversed its situation; starting in the late 1990s it has been able to improve school enrollment rates (de Mello & Hoppe, 2005, p. 18) and youths’ low illiteracy rate has functioned as an indicator of Brazil’s success (YouthPolicy, 2014). The educational reform process that started during the 1990s by the center-right President Cardoso was also embraced and developed by his leftist counterparts Lula and Rousseff in the first decade of the 2000s. The educational reforms were constructed on three pillars to overcome the obstacles to accessing education: equalizing funds across different administrational units, measuring learning outcomes according to a nationalized scale and promoting education via the Bolsa Escola branch of the famous Bolsa social program series, and transferring payments to low-income families with the stipulation that the parents would send their children to school regularly (Bruns et al., 2012, p. xviii). Thanks to the increasing economic wealth and the determination of decision makers to alleviate socio-economic problems including educational ones in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Brazil’s educational quality has eventually become not only better but also the political focus.

Educational Reform in Contemporary Turkey and Brazil

Thanks to generous public funds and relatively effective policies, education in today’s Turkey has mainly overcome the earlier challenges of the past century such as illiteracy, early school drop-out, lower schooling rates for girls, and insufficient facilities. Education has become a prioritized area of public policy in Turkey in accordance with the 11th Development Plan (2019–2023). Thus, education will have the largest share of investments in Turkey for the 2020–2023 period (Presidency of the Republic of Turkey [PRT], 2019, p. 106, Art. 430.3) as “the investments for transition to single-shift education and the expansion of preschool education will have a significant share while the modernization of vocational and technical education workshops, establishment of design and skill workshops, and increasing the quality of education at all levels will be other prominent investment areas” (p. 106, Art. 430.4). Nevertheless, the debate on the need to improve the quality of education still constitutes the main point of discussion. What is understood from the phrase “quality of education” has transformed from a generalized goal into a concrete path due to the several developments in the political and economic realms over the past decades. Politically, Turkey’s candidacy for the European Union (EU) full membership, which started in 2004, has paved the way for the design and implementation of educational reforms for compatibility with the educational systems and performances of EU member countries. Secondly, the economic growth of Turkey has at the same time facilitated the public funding capabilities for educational expenses, from building facilities to improving teacher education quality, surely easing the implementation of reforms. The economic growth has also allowed families to spend more generously on their children’s education-related expenses. Thus, the need to build or rebuild a competitive educational system in order to secure the economic expansion of the country and provide a better future for children via education has become clear. This has catalyzed the goal of quality improvement in education and put into operation the necessary reforms tied to more concrete, measurable, and goal-oriented standards such as comparisons with EU members or OECD states through PISA and PIRLS rankings.

Hence, the path of structural (2004) and curricular (2005) educational reform attempts in Turkey (Akşit, 2007, pp. 132–133) during the first two decades of the twenty-first century have been directly linked with the EU membership process. The idea of fragmenting the highly centralized structure of the education administration in Turkey was the basis of the structural reform attempt of 2004. Thus, the reform proposal was severely criticized for socio-economic and political reasons by various stakeholders and did not evolve into a cohesive policy (p. 135). Meanwhile, MoNE started a curricular reform program divided into separate implementation phases to eventually change both the curricula for all grades and re-evaluate the competencies defined for teachers started in 2005 despite criticisms, and it is still in action (p. 133).

Within the scope of the educational reform goal and alongside the comparisons with OECD and EU countries, MoNE has been studying systemic assessment through the reports on achievements and the challenges of material capabilities with reference to the human dimension. According to research conducted by MoNE (2011, p. 284) regarding students, teachers, and administerial staff, the main insufficiencies challenging the goal of achieving the desired student profile for the twenty-first century were reported as foreign language learning, arts education, and the compatibility of education with the qualities of international standards. A similar survey had also been conducted earlier (MoNE, 2001, p. iv) to measure the gap between the teaching staff’s current capabilities and the desired profile of the modern teacher for the new millennium. The survey revealed that, although participant teachers regarded themselves as close to the ideal teacher profile by means of capabilities, characteristics, and competencies, most of the other participants from different segments (varying from students to union representatives) did not share the same opinion. The report also defined the ideal teacher in reference to the task of preparing Turkish society for the information age.

Both the ongoing progress in curriculum reform and the halted process about structural reform have remained under criticism, mostly in relation to other areas of discussion such as the centralized system (Başdemir, 2014, p. 118), the status of disadvantaged groups such as migrants or handicapped children, the importance of human rights in the curricula, and opportunity inequalities within education (Education Reform Initiative [ERG], 2020). Thus, the state (Zaim, 1987), civil society (ERG, 2020), and international organizations (Kitchen et al., 2019: 48) have explicated the main challenge to overcome by way of educational reform to be the issue of the quality of education. Moreover, the 11th Development Plan has defined this goal to be “to train qualified people to convert knowledge into economic and social benefits as being capable of employing technology towards production [without omitting the task of raising] productive and happy individuals” (PRT, 2019, p. 137, Art. 537).

When compared to the influence the EU has had on the educational reform initiatives in Turkey, educational reform in Brazil can be regarded as having been determined by internal priorities due to the lack of any such political engagement with an international organization. However, this inference is misleading. Since the 1940s, just like most of the remaining Global South, Brazil has been in close cooperation with the World Bank and other UN institutions such as the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to finance, design, and implement policies aimed at overcoming socio-economic inequalities within the society. Nevertheless, the narrow economics-based approach of these organizations in addressing the problem of inequality with a focus on success and their standard solutions disregarding the distinctive political, social, and environmental conditions of the countries including Brazil with which they collaborate have been criticized (Krawcyzk, 2002, pp. 57–59; Trojan, 2009, p. 11).

Two main challenges stand before the educational reform efforts in Brazil aside from overcoming the administrative problems of the educational system due to having high numbers of students over a large geographical area. The first one is rooted in the size of the inequality gap among social segments, which also reflects the race-based social, cultural, and economic discrepancies between the design and praxis of Brazil’s educational policies. The insufficiencies in material capabilities, accessibility to high-quality public education, and financial resources to train qualified teachers as well as the low-income level of teaching and administerial staff can be listed in regard to the economic problems. Which segments of society can succeed in the central university entrance examination? How difficult is it to be placed in a public university? Should the rich start paying for public university education? These are the main questions widely discussed in Brazil. The reason for the discussion lies in the belief that to succeed in university entrance examinations, high school students and graduates must come from successful high schools and receive private tutoring and/or attend preparation courses run by private institutions. While the validity of this thesis is open to discussion (Naoe et al., 2019), private education’s ability to generate opportunities for success in the university entrance examinations (ENEM and vestibulares) and especially for accessing prestigious public universities cannot be argued. The paradox of wealthy students with private high school education studying at public universities without paying and lower income students with public high school education ending up in private universities and faculties has arisen (Schreiber, 2017). The second challenge impeding educational reform in Brazil is not exempt from its socio-economic problems but is also not solely based on them. Urban security problems in general as well as rates of homicide and other crime among youth are quite high (Cerqueira et al., 2019, pp. 29–31). Thus, securing students’ physical safety has become more a priority than providing better education by any means has.

Despite the ongoing social and economic problems defining the orientation of educational reform, as the largest emerging economy in Latin America, Brazil shares Turkey’s concerns of catching up with the educational level of developed countries so as to be able to compete with them, especially in regard to high technology. Thus, the Youth Statute was declared in 2013 in order to improve the life quality, education, and employment opportunities of the youth; it was a milestone in the country’s history (Estatuto da Juventude, 2013). More recently, the federal government has also launched a series of initiatives to provide accessibility to technology in education, especially for disadvantaged groups, and to promote curricula compatibility in parallel with the needs of local business sectors (Ministério da Mulher, da Família e dos Direitos Humanos, 2019).

Conclusion

The discussion on the necessity and success of educational reforms is not solely settled on the shoulders of developing nations; they also constitute a constant source of anxiety for developed nations as well (Hacsi, 2003, p. 45; Howarth, 2005). Despite the similarities explained in the introduction to this chapter, Turkey and Brazil also have remarkable differences. Turkey is governed by a recently introduced presidential system based on the unitary government model, which differs from the Brazilian presidential system based on federalism. In contrast to Turkey, the federal system in Brazil sanctions a high level of authorization in decision-making and implementing educational policies in local governments. Moreover, Brazil is approximately 11 times larger in size with more than twice the population of Turkey, resulting in a lower population density that burdens the shoulders of the Brazilian governments more in overcoming the budgetary problems of education more productively. However, starting from the democratization period in the 1980s, the policymaking process has been under decentralization until recently. Such efforts have contributed to the inclusion of states, municipalities, youths, and other shareholders in decision-making processes not just at the local level but also at the federal (Tekin, 2020). Nevertheless, despite the advantages of participatory decision-making, such policies also leave governors and mayors with the problem of tackling the financial issues. Wealth is unequally distributed, not just among citizens but also among the states in Brazil. Thus, increasing the level of decentralization carries the risk of unintentionally contributing to the deepening of existing socio-economic inequalities in Brazil.

The high enrollment rates in Turkey, especially in public universities, contrasts the situation in Brazil. With the rising number of universities in Turkey, especially in the last decade, the number of university students has already passed more than eight million, almost 10% of the entire population. Almost all Turkish universities have Continuous Learning Centers offering several courses; in addition, four state universities (Anadolu University in Eskişehir, Istanbul’s Istanbul University, Atatürk University in Erzurum, and Ahmet Yesevi University in AnkaraFootnote 2) have popular Distance Learning Programs. Thus, one can easily say that university education is no longer an elite matter as enrolling in universities has become much easier with either partial or full scholarships provided by the state or foundation universities’ bursary programs.

As a result, because of the global way in which formal education has been attached with modernization, both Turkey and Brazil have had to pay much more attention to formal education at all levels to catch up with Western powers. Moreover, as both countries have been labeled as late modernizing countries, they have both had to view education as a way to raise their citizens in line with the state ideals issued by their respective governments. Finally, countries trying either to develop or keep their development intact have had to put the lion’s share of the national budget toward education, including research and development, rather than extravagant spending on military issues. This is why Turkey and Brazil seem perfect as examples trying to have more of a voice in global politics in the twenty-first century by raising their human capital through education.