From schools to universities, Foz becomes an education hub

From the first wooden schoolhouses built in the early 20th century to the current public and private universities, Foz do Iguaçu has achieved a prominent place when it comes to education. The border city currently has three free public higher education institutions, six private institutions and ten distance learning centers.

Located at one of the extremes of Brazil, Foz do Iguaçu has seen slow and late development in education. The first free schools were created with the help of the Catholic Church and the spiritualist center CEPAC.

In the 1970s, Itaipu Binacional gave the sector a boost by building two Anglo-Americano schools in 1976, one in Vila A and the other in Vila C, to exclusively serve the children of the company's employees. In 1982, Anglo's doors were opened to the residents of Foz, and the school became the largest in Paraná, with 14.600 students.

Higher education also emerged, but late. The first institution was the Faculty of Applied Social Sciences of Foz do Iguaçu (Facisa), created in 1979 after protests by students against the neglect of education. Many of them had to leave the city to obtain higher education. Administered by the now-defunct Foz do Iguaçu Educational Foundation (Funefi), Facisa charged symbolic monthly fees.

In 1986, another student movement began, this time to bring public education to the city. It was from this initiative that the State University of Western Paraná (Unioeste) was founded on December 23, 1994, at a time when the main cities in the state already had free universities.

Unioeste took over the existing structure at Facisa, which already had courses in Administration, Accounting, Literature and Tourism.

It was only in the 1990s that the educational hub began to germinate. In addition to Unioeste, several private higher education institutions emerged. The main ones were the Unified Colleges of Foz do Iguaçu (Unifoz), in 1993; the Higher Education Center of Foz do Iguaçu (Cesufoz), in 1993; the Dynamics of the Falls University Center (UDC), in 2000; the Physical Education College of Foz do Iguaçu (FEFI), in 2000; the Union of the Americas College (UniAmérica), in 2001; and more recently, in 2022, the Multiversa College.

In 2008, the Federal Institute of Paraná (IFPR) was created, which occupies the facilities of the former Floresta Clube, in Vila A.

Educational hub

It can be said that the educational hub was truly consolidated with the creation of the Federal University for Latin American Integration (Unila), in 2010, which brought professors and students from several countries, with a predominance of Latin Americans.

Today, the federal university offers 29 undergraduate courses. It currently has 4.241 undergraduate students, including Africans, Asians, refugees, humanitarian visa holders and indigenous people, and 843 postgraduate students. It offers 11 master's degrees and two doctorates.

At the other end, Unioeste has 13 undergraduate courses, five master's degrees and one doctorate. There are 2.053 undergraduate students and 267 postgraduate students.  

For professor and sociologist José Afonso de Oliveira, the expansion of education in Foz has been remarkable, making it one of the fastest-growing sectors in the city in recent years. In his opinion, education has been organized in line with the city's growth and needs.

“As the city expanded horizontally, schools and colleges were created.” For Oliveira, while the private network operates, in some way, without any supervision or control from state bodies and is more linked to market issues, public schools, he emphasizes, are more focused on citizenship issues.

In the context of secondary education, Oliveira highlights the presence of the Colégio Agrícola Manoel Moreira Pena, which receives students from the region and even from Paraguay; the Colégio Bartolomeu Mitre, the oldest in the city; the Colégio Monsenhor Guilherme and the Escola Normal, whose courses were offered in some schools to train teachers.

Distance learning phenomenon

After the consolidation of in-person education, Foz do Iguaçu is experiencing the phenomenon of distance learning (EaD), following the trend in national education. Therefore, in recent years, it has become common for there to be surplus places in free universities, especially in some courses at Unila and Unioeste, and for the number of students in some private institutions to fall.

Market Studies Coordinator at Hoper Educação – Educational Consultancy based in Foz do Iguaçu, Paulo Presse says that the movement of universities in the city follows the Brazilian panorama in some aspects.

One of them is the preference for Law and Psychology courses in the face-to-face modality in the private network. Another point that draws attention is the expansion of the distance learning modality, as is already happening in Brazil.

To give you an idea, the number of distance learning enrollments in the city went from 1.471 in 2012 to 7.360 in 2022, in the private network, while in the face-to-face modality it fell from 9.832 to 6.596 in the same period, according to statistics collected by Hoper. 

Despite this, Presse believes there is a sign of the resumption of in-person teaching, which began in 2022 in the country, after the pandemic. “For the first time, we see signs of in-person teaching growing,” he mentions.

One of the reasons for the demand for distance learning is the cost of tuition fees. In distance learning, the average monthly fee is R$210, while in face-to-face courses it reaches R$786.

For Professor José Afondo Oliveira, the preference for distance learning has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic and has several different origins, including ease for those who work and the digital age itself. He considers it a fabulous innovation in a huge country with great differences. However, he draws attention to the teaching style.

Distance learning, he says, is not a traditional classroom summarized in a computer. “It is a different form of teaching, centered on the student, which at first seems easy, but many simply give up.” 

Education, in the early days

Foz do Iguaçu only had a school after the period of the Military Colony (1889–1912). At that time, education was provided by people who were willing to work as private teachers, usually in homes, and was therefore restricted to families with financial resources and government employees.

Therefore, until the creation of the municipality, education was private and home-based. The wealthiest families took their children to Guarapuava, Curitiba and even to Argentine and Paraguayan cities to study, such as Posadas, in Argentina, and Asunción, in Paraguay, as reported by Denise Sbardelotto and João Jorge Correa, in an article published in 2009 in Journal of Theory and Practice of Education.

With the founding of the municipality of Vila Iguassú in 1914, and the arrival of more families, the need for a school was seen. Therefore, the municipality built a school building between 1915 and 1916, which was still quite precarious.

School group

From 1914 onwards, the federal government felt the need to teach the population to read and write, so that they could sign the ballot, by creating school houses. But before that, the State Government had already begun to institutionalize school groups.  

And it was only in 1927 that access to free education arrived in the city. An agreement between the State Government and the Catholic Church resulted in the first school group in Foz do Iguaçu and Western Paraná, Caetano Munhoz da Rocha, which later became Colégio Bartolomeu Mitre.

Founded in 1927, the Caetano Munhoz da Rocha School Group had two priest teachers and two female teachers from Foz do Iguaçu. Activities began in a wooden building on a plot of land in front of the old City Council, in Praça Getúlio Vargas.

The first director was Monsignor Guilherme Maria Thiletzek (who gives his name to the current Colégio Monsenhor Guilherme), and the initial teaching staff was made up of professors João Worth, José Winks (both priests), Aretuza Reis da Silva and Francisca Vesino Correia.

Among the students in the first class to graduate from the six-year Complementary course were Rui Ferreira, Valdemar Fairtag, Maria Dolores A. Padilha, Agripina Vera, Alberto Rangel Baptista, Rufino Lafuente and Antonio Ayres Aguirre (the first notary of Foz do Iguaçu).

In 1929, teachers Iguassuína Ferreira and Mercedes Braga became part of the teaching staff. In the 1930s, the school group was named Grupo Escolar Bartolomeu Mitre, a name chosen by the then mayor Jorge Sanwais.

The first teaching staff, according to Sbardelotto and Correa, was formed by Catarina, Maria Reis da Silva, Ottília Schimmelpfeng, Iguassuína F. Coimbra, the director Iolanda Fava Lenzi and the inspector known as Iaiá. At this stage, the priests stopped teaching. 

Despite the name change, the Bartolomeu Mitre School Group was officially created in 1944, by decree, and at the time was directed by teacher Ruth Sottomaior Pedroso.

The presence of the school group did not guarantee access to the poorest children. Therefore, in 1940, the CEPAC Spiritist Center built the Jorge Schimmelpfeng School House, whose building is preserved to this day and is undergoing restoration. The school welcomed many children who until then had no access to education.