2025 - Edition 88 | January 13

Faced with new projects, IMDS promotes debate on education and seeks to point out ways to improve the process of learning to read and write

Hello Leitor,

With the beginning of 2026, IMDS is faced with its possible biggest challenge this year: the Pisa 2037 project. The young people who will take the Pisa (Program for International Student Assessment) that year are precisely those who, today, are transitioning from kindergarten to elementary school. Hence this year's choice.

When we reflect on the reasons for the modest level of income in Brazil and its high inequality, education emerges as an important factor. In the educational process, literacy is the most critical barrier. This is because it is the code that allows us to decipher everything we must learn later whether at school or throughout life.

The fundamental stage of learning is also one of the most controversial. Learning to read and write are two of the main achievements that all children should acquire in school. But Brazil continues to fail in literacy.

SAEB indicates that, in the second year, 1 in 2 students from public schools in Brazil are not properly literate. In contrast, for students in private schools, only 1 in 4 children finish this stage in the same situation. The results of public schools are especially worrisome, because at this educational stage, the public system accounts for approximately 90% of total enrollments.

Learning to read means learning to decode. Literacy means teaching how to decode. When a child does not master this skill, his school trajectory is compromised. The country loses talent and the economy pays the bill with low productivity.

The question of how to ensure that all children learn to read and write at the appropriate age raises heated discussions about what to teach, how to teach and when to start this process. The debate revolves around the theoretical approaches that guide the teaching of reading and writing and the methods that derive from these approaches.

This clash is not exclusive to Brazil. On the international scene, it became known as reading wars, or the great debate. On the one hand, the phonic approach, based on evidence from the cognitive science of reading, defends the explicit and systematic teaching of the correspondences between graphemes and phonemes. On the other hand, the approach known as whole language values exposure to authentic texts and the construction of meaning as the main way to learn to read.

The Cognitive Science of Reading, consolidated in recent decades as an interdisciplinary field (Snow & Hulme, 2013), has provided robust evidence on the processes of learning to read and on the foundations that should guide its instruction. By integrating neuroscience, cognitive psychology, linguistics, and education, this field broke with intuitive or exclusively philosophical approaches, offering a consistent empirical basis for thinking about literacy.

And this empirical evidence is unanimous: the phonic method is the method that adheres to the process of learning and mastering language. Practically all developed countries in the world adopt the phonic method to teach their children to read and write. Although evident, here in Brazil, its adoption meets enormous resistance.

The Pisa 2037 Project aims to discuss and propose solutions to improve our education and indicate what should be done as a public policy so that children who are currently learning to read and write can reach 2037 with the possibility of achieving the average results of OECD countries.

Throughout the year we will present the evolution of the project and the results obtained.

May 2026 come full of hope, health, joy and achievements.

See you in the next "IMDS Letter"!

Paulo Tafner

CEO