In their classic setup, with a classroom consisting of a blackboard, a standing teacher, and seated students, the interior spaces of a school can easily be mistaken for prisons. Now consider the outdoor, public areas of most educational institutions in Brazil: how often can a place be recognized as a school simply by looking at it from afar?
It is through fences, iron windows, sparse green areas, and crumbling gray walls that we usually recognize Brazilian public schools. When evaluated in terms of their environment and the resources available for learning, the country's schools show that they are still far from ensuring that these physical elements play an educational role in the development of children and adolescents.
For context, according to data from the 2014 School Census, seven out of ten educational units in the country do not have sports courts, only 17% have a reading room, and just over 12,000 have built laboratories to support science education. If you consider these resources superfluous, you might be shocked to learn that more than 23,000 schools in Brazil do not even offer restrooms on their premises.
