ā I usually don't post anything about politics in my blog, I try to go neutral not to show my political position. Going to the left? Right? Usually, I want that my readers to read my posts with a balanced view. However, this is very difficult, and our way of thinking goes towards a specific point of view more likely to be in one of the two "political poles".
ā Hive Learners contest this week challenged me a lot in this way. However, I will try avoiding my best to fall into this trap. I'm from Brazil and I live in Canada for almost 6 years now, I will go through my first Provincial election during this next May. And I will vote with conviction to avoid some problems that the rival party is bringing. They plan to reduce some investments in some important areas that I consider of major importance. But no, I won't talk about that, despite my fingers starting to itch a bit.
ā My main topic would be probably a main world problem which of course, some countries go more toward this mistake, probably because they have tight budgets. But as we see a world economic crisis, we see also big countries going towards this mistake. I will talk a bit about how countries with economic problems, start cutting money on education and/ or science. As an example, I will use my home country Brazil, but talking with friends from other countries like India, we see similar problems.
ā I know a bit about these topics in Brazil since I spent most of my time pursuing an academic career in Brazil, such as a Master's and Ph.D. but I was also a public servant of the State of Rio de Janeiro as a high school biology teacher. I could talk a bit about the difference between being a public school teacher or science in Canada and Brazil another time since the main focus is to try to show how politicians decide to cut money in these areas.
ā When you talk in the universities about government investment in these areas in universities or schools, you see a trend of people saying that we need to avoid the right parties since they will cut investments in education and science. However, that is half true. I agree that candidates of the right party will tend to cut MORE than the left party. Since they prefer reducing public taxes for example. However, in Brazil, there is an area financed by the government that NEVER gets cuts, on the contrary, they only get more investments and salary raises, the justice. Since the technician in a court that only stamps judicial processes, they receive lots of salary raises during the last years of the judge. Why during problems in the economy they cut science and education? Politicians don't see the importance of these areas. Public education in Brazil is dying since rich people can cover the costs of a private school. All the politicians have money so they don't give a s**t about public education which targets the poor that can't cover the costs of private basic education.
ā Science is another big hit in investment cuts. Politicians don't understand why the country needs to develop its own science. I will give an example of a problem during the left party mandate to show that it isn't a pure problem of the left or right in power. The former president called Dilma Rousseff created an interesting program, called Science without frontiers in 2011. In theory, this was an approach to giving young people in university or graduate programs term scholarships to get experience somewhere abroad. However, the program had some problems filtering between students that were really interested in doing science and getting experience abroad and students that wanted to travel abroad to party. I know many people that had good experiences abroad in this program and used it well. But many bad stories also were shown and the program spent tons of money and created a deficit in the Science Ministery. Meanwhile, other types of regular options for graduate students to make collaborations with outside institutions had to pause as well. I was in the middle of my Ph.D. and I wanted to have this opportunity to make a collaboration with an external university to enrich my project, but I received an answer from the government project that they didn't have funds this year to accommodate anyone. Science without frontiers ended in 2017 right after the impeachment of that president, but it is a good example of the left party that also fails to deal with science as well. To balance this hammering in the left party, since most of the science is public in Brazil, Master's and Ph.D. students have their salary fixed and they could have only a raise during the start of this current year after 10 years without a raise. The Ph.D. salary was around 400 USD and it isn't considered a full-time job by concept, but the supervisors usually demand the student to be fully dedicated to their job. Very difficult to sustain a family with this money. Just to compare, a judiciary technician that demands only finalizing a high school, pays 1,500 USD per month. That is the imbalance of the country with its investments.
ā After reading this text you can start to figure out why I left the country, but as I said before here in Canada there are some problems too. Science also gets cut once in a while. So what should we do to change people's minds about these two areas? Once I heard from someone in hive that "we won't fix ignorance in the world, it will exist forever", but I am more optimistic. Scientists and educators need to continue to show their value to the population and this way maybe we can change the future.