Translator: Claudia Sander Reviewer: Vanessa Soneghet
Education is the most powerful weapon
we can use to change this country.
According to the latest PISA, in 2015,
on the QEdu portal of the Lemann Foundation,
attended by 70 countries,
Brazil ranked 59th in reading,
63rd in science,
and 65th in mathematics.
Fifteen percent of young people between 15 and 17 years old in our country
are out of the classroom.
This means about 1.5 million young people around the country.
According to our 2017 school census,
almost 11% of all public schools in the country do not have water,
12% do not have a library,
37% do not have accessible toilets
and almost 55% do not have a science laboratory.
To help change this scenario,
I co-founded a movement called "Mapa Educação,"
a movement that fights daily
so that all Brazilians, men and women,
may have access to quality education.
Let me start telling you a little about myself first.
I was born in São Gonçalo, land of the eternal clown Carequinha,
Claudinho and Buchecha, Vinícius Júnior,
among other talents.
I like to introduce myself as an "almost authentic carioca."
I am son and nephew of teachers
and everything that happened in my life was through education.
When I was ten, an uncle told me,
"Renan, you have to go to the Military School."
He told me how fantastic it was,
a public school that would open up my horizons,
a premium school,
where I'd have different opportunities -
he told me several arguments.
But he only convinced me when he said that the admission test was at Maracanã.
Inside the Maracanã,
the stadium of the leader of the Brazilian soccer championship.
With this motivation, I took the test ...
and I failed.
I almost gave up forever, I thought that it wasn't for me,
it didn't belong to me,
that I wouldn't be able to study in a quality public school,
but with the help of teachers, mentors -
I'm very grateful in my life for having had many mentors
who really changed my perspectives -
I decided to try again.
I went back to Maracanã, but this time to score a goal.
I rated in sixth place in the selection process for the Military School,
which became much more than my uncle said.
In a short time, the school became my second home.
There, I had access to an education
that went well beyond the four walls of the classroom.
Olympiads of mathematics, chemistry, physics, astronomy, history,
whatever, we were in.
There I had different classes, very dedicated teachers,
I played sports like riding, fencing ...
What public school in the country offers sports like these?
And most of all, the school taught me to dream big.
And through a teacher, I knew about a project called
"Solidariedade em Marcha," Somar,
which carries out many social activities in the Lins Complex,
a set of favelas located between the north and west zones of Rio de Janeiro,
around the Grajau-Jacarepagua road.
And there I started doing several punctual actions, helping,
but, a cousin and I wanted to do something bigger.
That's when we decided to create something more continuous,
the English Somar.
The English Somar was a community English course
in which we gave English classes
to children and young people of the Lins Complex
every Saturday morning.
As much as I was the teacher, I was the one who learned the most there.
With this project I realized that I'd want to work with people,
to people and for people.
At the same time,
I heard about the possibility of studying abroad,
when a girl, also from São Gonçalo,
who'd also studied at the Military School, was accepted at Harvard.
And that was astonishing at the time,
both in Brazil and in my life.
I wondered, "How can anyone get a high school education in Brazil
and go straight to Harvard?"
But immediately I said, "This girl is a genius, she's an exception,
she's a lot smarter than me, there's no way, that's impossible for me."
But the following year, other young people,
some of them also coming from the public school network,
were eventually accepted into other major universities.
And I started to think,
"Maybe this impossible is not so impossible."
But I had to consider that my family couldn't afford the high costs
of the selection process -
or "application," as we call this process to try to study at American universities.
But then I discovered two organizations
that would offer mentoring and assume all the costs of the process.
I've never spent a cent.
Then I decided to apply to ten universities,
and I ended up being accepted in nine of them -
(Cheers) (Applause)
and I ended up going to Harvard,
where I studied Economics and Political Science.
And this place, this academic Disneyland,
turned out to be a revolution in my life.
There I had classes with phenomenal professors,
met and made friends of more than 80 nationalities
and, mainly, I understood that the mission of my life
was to work with educational causes.
However, since life is not a bed of roses,
I had to change the 104ºF of my beloved Rio de Janeiro
for -4ºF in Boston.
And people would ask, "But one gets used to it, right?"
No, you don't get used to it, you just accept it.
You just grin and bear it.
It is terrible, guys! Crazy! But that's it.
And Harvard taught me very quickly that I wanted to work
with causes or initiatives
that could expand opportunities for other young people,
especially future generations,
to have similar or even better opportunities than I did.
For this, together with two friends, I started "O Formigueiro,"
which was the first site of crowdfunding in Brazil for education only.
The idea was quite simple,
we connected educational projects that needed help
with people who wanted to help these projects, these initiatives,
checking up on them through different tools and ways.
We did this with many projects around the country.
The one that impressed me most was this one, at Quixelô,
a small town in the countryside of Ceará.
Gilberto, a Physical Education teacher,
one of these anonymous heroes of our huge Brazil,
created a soccer school conditioned to the reading of books.
The children could only take part on the soccer school
if they had good grades and read one book every two weeks.
And if they were having difficulties,
he offered a remedial program
and these children could play if they attended the remedial program.
And these kids would play without a goalpost, without soccer shoes,
without any basic material.
Gilberto asked for 1,390 Brazilian reais to buy sports equipment and books.
In three weeks he raised that money at the Formigueiro.
The Formigueiro financed more than 60 projects around the country,
raising around 100,000 Brazilian reais.
But in a country with more than 200 million inhabitants
and 40 million students in basic education,
it became increasingly clear to me
that the real impact on our education system
had to come through public policies
and civil society mobilization.
With that in mind, and with inspiring friends,
Fernando, Edu, Ligia, Tabata and Daniel, among others,
we decided to create some service or product
that could engage the youth on the course of our country's education system.
But, first of all, we thought it was important for us to understand
and talk with those who understand about education in Brazil.
For that, we decided to take about ten interviews.
These 10 interviews turned into 104
and from there came the "Manifesto Mapa do Buraco,"
a supra-party manifesto
that identified the main bottlenecks and holes in our education system
and pointed to some success stories,
such as Sobral, in Ceará,
and Foz do Iguaçu, in Paraná.
The manifesto had a great repercussion in 2014,
guiding many of the educational conversations that happened
in the so polarized elections that we had in the country that year
and showed that there was a space for young protagonism,
especially in education.
In order to allow new initiatives such as the Mapa do Buraco to exist,
we co-founded, in 2015, the "Mapa Educação" movement,
with the mission of ensuring
that all Brazilians can have access to quality education
through youth protagonism.
Mapa Educação operates on two major fronts.
First,
we promote unlikely debates
and watch over electoral promises in education.
For example, in 2016, through our "Mapa nas Eleições" project,
we ended the political indication
of school principals in the town of Campina Grande, countryside of Paraíba.
Our other arm,
our other great front,
is empowering young leaders in education
who have incredible projects at a local level
through conferences, workshops, support networks and other initiatives.
Last year, we had the second Mapa Educação Conference,
which brought together more than 300 young people
from different parts of the country
to exchange ideas, to learn from each other
and to share their learnings.
One of the participants of this conference was Ariene dos Santos.
Ariene is a native Brazilian from the Wapixana ethnic group,
from the state of Roraima,
more specifically from the community of Truaru,
located 40 miles away from the state capital, Boa Vista.
Ariene traveled more than 2,500 miles to have her voice heard;
to say how important education is for indigenous people,
to say how important education is for each and every Brazilian.
Finally, it became clear to me
that the cause of my life
is to turn Brazilian education into a world model.
Because I believe that more important than deciding what you want to be
is deciding what you want to change.
Therefore, I decided,
as soon as I graduated, in December 2017,
to come back to Brazil,
to continue my work as a social entrepreneur
and an activist for education.
It was time to come back and make it happen.
It was time to channel all my energy
to help get our kids out of the court benches
and put them on the school benches.
Especially because
it was time to develop the wings and take care of the roots
at the same time,
in the same place.
Because, as Nelson Mandela said,
"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world."
Thank you very much.
(Applause) (Cheers)