Brazil, Education and Inequality

Reading about Brazil, I was surprised to learn that the country has no national system of education. As a result, the quality of education and how much children learn in school varies tremendously from state to state. Many believe that this "uneven character of education has been a major factor in the maintenance of a society that is profoundly unequal." In high school, my English teacher read to us from "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" by Paulo Freire, a Brazilian activist who was eventually exiled from Brazil by the government. He tried to educate those who were not receiving a fair education, saying "the first step to knowledge is that you must know you do not know." Do any classmates have examples of the inequality in distribution of wealth or standards of living in Brazil?