Viña Junior scored five goals in La Liga to help Real Madrid take the lead in the points after a great start to the season. The 21-year-old has also made a difference off the game. With the goal of making Brazil a more fair country, the forward for Brazil started Instituto Vini Jr., a group that tries to teach young Brazilians through sports and technology.
The quality of Brazil’s public school system is far from perfect. Rich families usually send their kids to expensive private schools because those schools give students the best chance of getting into government colleges across the country, which admit good students for free. Since college is free in Brazil, it seems like everyone can move up in society. However, rich parents can easily cheat the system by sending their children to top private schools.
Vinicius wants to help students who can’t pay for a private school because he knows how hard it can be for kids from poor families. His group launched Base, a piece of educational software that uses football to keep kids interested. The software was first used at his old school in Rio, and it’s supposed to get even better over the next year.
Vinícius says, “My first goal was to help these young kids do better in school.” “It’s a dream to play football, but isn’t it great that we can help poor kids get an education and get out of poverty?” It’s something I want to do in the middle and long term. We need more engineers, lawyers, and doctors who live in favelas. The chances they need will be given to them.
A lot of people in Brazil still can’t read or write. Being familiar with how the program worked, we should have put it to use at my old school. Of course, I remember many good things about those times, but football games stand out! I really believe I’m capable of more than I thought. That’s something athletes have done many times. I get ideas from the work that Marcus Rashford, LeBron James, and Lewis Hamilton do. To begin, I did good things in my area. But who knows if they will spread all over Brazil.
The area where Vini and his family live in Rio, called São Gonçalo, has always been good to them. His family gave him small things and helped him in any way they could when he was younger and wasn’t making a lot of money playing football. He can do more now that he plays for Real Madrid and represents Brazil abroad. He is the only one who supports the school because he put about R$2 million of his own money into it to begin with.
Putting sports and learning together was a good idea. With this app, you can look forward to learning. We worked on it for a year and a half, and the epidemic made us realise how important it is to make places where people live better. Our goal is to help close a big gap in education that occurs between the classes. “I saw how important this is and how the activities make the kids feel better when I went to see them a few months ago,” he says.
The program is used in the school. They need to do each level and activity properly in order to pass. We also do things with the kids in person, like maths and Portuguese, and sports are always in the background. Kids, on the other hand, learn more about global social problems like how important it is to respect everyone and everything around us.
An eight-year-old girl at the school named Bruna Ferreira Matos is one of the kids using the app. She’s glad to be a part of it. It has lots of puzzles in it. It seemed easier to me to learn with Base than from my books, and I really liked it. It’s so great that I wish I could use it every day.
The idea is being used for the first time at the school named after the philosopher and teacher Paulo Freire from Brazil. Vini Jr. and his group want to make it bigger next year, though. This is just the beginning.