ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes developed public policies on basic education for young people and adults, highlights age as an important factor of discrimination in women’s struggle for educational rights. In the complex matrix of selection, discrimination, and exclusion factors that make up Brazilian education, gender structures barely emerge. Brazilian legislative documents and educational policies have referred to basic education for adults since end of the nineteenth century. Public action organized around adult education grew in importance after 1945, when 25 percent of the National Fund for Primary Education resources was directed to literacy programs and campaigns. One of the achievements of the democratic transition period was legal recognition of youth and adult education rights within 1988 Constitution. The new constitution guaranteed access to public and free basic education for all. The principal instrument of educational reform targeting decentralization of educational finance and emphasizing basic education for children and adolescents was the Fourteenth Constitutional Amendment, approved by the Congress in 1996.
