Barra da Tijuca beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Felipe Dana/AP
Enio Ohmaye was 14 years old when his family went broke.
Throughout Ohmaye’s childhood, his father had run a thriving imports business, selling fine crystals and luxury watches to wealthy government employees in Brazil’s capital city, Brasilia. Ohmaye says he felt like “a spoiled little prince” during the good years. But in 1964, the Brazilian government was overthrown by a military coup, and four years later, Congress was shut down. The once prosperous government workers who had frequented the store were now jobless, and Ohmaye’s father went bankrupt.
By the time Ohmaye was 18, after years of struggling in Brazil, he bought a ticket to the United States in installments, so he could work as a busboy at a country club in Monticello, New York. A year later, with a little money in his pocket, he moved back to Brazil to get a degree in computer programming. Ohmaye says he had an easier time at it than his classmates did, for one reason only. “I could read the manuals,” he says.
The manuals were written in English, which Ohmaye had picked up during his year abroad. His classmates weren’t as fortunate. “My English was so good compared to the students next to me,” Ohmaye remembers. “It completely changed my life.” And now he wants to change other lives in much the same way.
Ohmaye finished college at the ripe old age of 27. He moved back to the U.S., after landing a job at IBM, and later became a scientist at Apple. And now, as CTO of the online learning institution Education First, Ohmaye wants to teach English to one million Brazilians before the start of the 2016 Rio Olympics.
‘My English was so good compared to the students next to me. It completely changed my life.’
Partnering with the Brazilian Olympic Committee as well as the Brazilian Ministry of Education, the company is opening its online language learning platform, Englishtown, to 550,000 high school students and 450,000 Olympic volunteers for free. And on Monday, the company announced a new partnership with the Ministry of Education to deploy a new language assessment test that can help determine what level of proficiency these new English learners already have, as well as measure their proficiency after taking the online courses.
Enio Ohmaye. Education First
“The point of doing this is to leave a legacy, so after the Olympics you don’t just end up with an empty Olympic town,” Ohmaye says. “That legacy is education and what we believe learning English can do for a country.”
This partnership is just the latest example of how countries are using emerging online education platforms to drive social change locally. As WIRED recently reported, countries like France, China, and even Saudi Arabia have recently partnered with the non-profit education company, edX, to launch their own so-called “massively open online courses” or MOOCs in recent years. They’re using these courses to teach tech courses or provide education to women and disadvantaged citizens. These new tech platforms give countries a way to scale education at a low cost.
Englishtown
But Education First is substantially more established than any of these new platforms. It was founded in 1965 by Swedish billionaire Bertil Hult, and employs more than 25,000 teachers in more than 400 brick and mortar schools across 50 countries. Englishtown, its online platform, only launched in 1996. Perhaps because of this extensive experience in the industry, Englishtown takes a fundamentally different approach to online learning than newer platforms.
For starters, it’s not free. That’s because, Ohmaye says, paying even a small amount for a course gives students more incentive to follow through. Plus, students who sign up for Englishtown get 24-7 access to a live teacher, and of course, those teachers need to be compensated.
Which explains why the company is starting with one million people, and not, say 6.5 million, the population of the Rio. Offering the classes for free comes at a substantial cost, to Education First and its local sponsors in Brazil. Ohmaye admits this is just an “entry point” to build some awareness among Brazilians about the importance of learning what is quickly becoming the universal language.
“It’s a long journey before we can change a country, but we are talking about a million people, not hundreds or thousands,” he says. “That kind of scale allows us to have an impact.”
Like India, Like Brazil?
In the past, says David Clingingsmith, associate professor of economics at Case Western University, efforts to teach English in India have had an enormous impact. “In India, English has played a big role in the development of the IT and business process outsourcing industry,” he says. And he believes it could do the same for Brazil, which has a less robust outsourcing industry.
But, he adds, English may not be as vital in a country like Brazil, which already has a booming local economy. “For a small country like the Netherlands, a lot of the economy has to do with international trade, so knowing English is going to be a big advantage to you,” he says. “But Brazil is a big economy, so a lot of economic activity will be among Brazilians, anyway.”
Naturally, Ohmaye takes a different view. “As you become an economic power, the role you have in the global economy grows, and if you really want to participate, you have to be able to speak a common language,” he says.
‘That’s What I Worry About’
Still, Ohmaye does have some reservations about how this whole program will play out, particularly in schools. To teach 550,000 students, the company must first teach 8,000 teachers, who will then train the students. Ceding that control to the Brazilian education system is a scary thing for Ohmaye. “There are many variables that are outside my control,” he says. “That’s what I worry about.”
Education First has run similar programs for the Sochi Olympics and this summer’s World Cup in Brazil, but never at this scale. And for Ohmaye, it’s never felt so personal. “It feels poetic,” he says. “For me, it’s like coming home with a gift in my hands.”
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