Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic, which is affecting the world, reached Brazil in March 2020 and brought consequences in the most diverse areas of society: the labor market, health, the economy and education. In the latter, the pandemic caused the suspension of face-to-face classes at all levels of education in the various Brazilian states. With regard to basic education, only private schools chose to use digital platforms to return to classes remotely, leaving out students from public schools. This fact reveals that an important proportion of students in public education do not have access to the internet and the necessary equipment to accompany online classes, which would be the new excluded from digital technologies in education. In view of the above, this article aims to analyze Brazil regional inequalities in Internet access for monitoring classes in the remote system of primary school students, within the scope of the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, the National Continuous Household Survey (PNADC) for 2018 was used as database. The information extracted from this research refers to the use of internet use in Brazilian households. Among the results, it can be seen that about 56,747 thousand private households had Internet access at home, of which 91.62% was located in the urban area and 8.38% in the rural area. It was also found that the Northeast region has the largest number of households in the rural area without an internet connection. In this scenario, students from the North and Northeast are those who would be facing greater difficulties with regard to internet access, given that the telephone operators end up offering a precarious service and that does not cover some locations in that territory. However, the results reveal that students from private schools are those who have access to the internet and technology to develop remote teaching activities in a greater proportion than students from public schools, a fact that would be evidencing the inequality of access to education. internet and technological means for monitoring classes in remote format. However, the Ministry of Education and Culture of Brazil authorized the return to classes remotely until the end of 2020, however it is questioned that not all students actually benefit from ntinuing classes. The beneficiaries are those who have access to the internet and the necessary equipment for this, causing a delay in returning to the face-to-face classes of students who were unable to follow the online classes because they do not have access to the internet and do not have technological equipment, in addition, they are students who live in households where the average income is less than R$ 600.00 per month. These results indicate that in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, these income differentials tend to become even more evident, since families that previously were in a situation of vulnerability tend to find themselves in an even worse situation. Therefore, the pandemic COVID-19, in the case of Brazil, highlights the social inequality in education by showing the great deficit of internet access and technological instruments to take classes in remote format, a difficulty experienced by many students to continue the process learning remotely.

Keywords:

COVID-19, Internet access, Remote classes.