More than One Third of Brazilians over the Age of Fourteen Have not Completed Elementary School

By Xiu Ying, Contributing Reporter

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Thirty-five percent of working age individuals in Brazil have not completed elementary school. The data were released last week by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) and form part of the National Household Sample Survey (Pnad) for the first quarter of 2019.

Elementary school is the second stage of primary education, directed at the six to fourteen-year-old population, and lasts nine years.

Brazil’s North and Northeast are the regions with the lowest level of education, that is, where most people did not complete this stage of learning.

In the North, 44.1 percent of those over the age of 14 had not completed primary school. In the Northeast, the rate was 38.7 percent.

The Southeast region registers the highest rate of access to secondary school: 29.2 percent of Brazilians there over age fourteen had not completed elementary school, followed by the Center-West (33.5 percent) and the South (34 percent).

The data also point out that 48 percent of all Brazilians over the age of 14 had completed high school in the first quarter of 2019.

Among the working population, the majority (60.3 percent) had completed secondary education, 20.7 percent held a graduate degree, and 25 percent had only completed elementary school.