Bulmer-Thomas V., Coatsworth J., Cortes-Conde R. The Cambridge Economic History of Latin America: Volume 2, The Long Twentieth Century

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472 Fernando Reimers

self-reliance and collective action. The reductions of Moxos and Chiquitos

in Bolivia, and the reductions in Paraguay, provided education linked to

the daily needs and the local conditions where the reduction was located.

There was also emphasis in artistic education, especially music. Expulsion

of the Jesuits from the Americas in the eighteenth century interrupted this

experiment.

At different times in Bolivia, policy elites targeted the poor in policy

rhetoric. President Hernando Siles, in his inaugural speech of January 6,

1926, announced a national crusade in favor of indigenous people (Cruzada

Nacional Pro-Indio), recognizing that education efforts until that point had

excluded them. The crusade was launched in April of the same year but

failed because of lack of popular support and, in particular, because of the

opposition from the landlords. In 1931,aBolivian educator, Elizardo Perez,

argued that rural schools should be explicitly designed to serve the needs

of indigenous children, establishing the School of Warisata. This school

was designed to serve the territorial limits of the social and economic orga-

nization of the Aymara people – the ayllu.Itwas designed to promote the

indigenous values of the ayllu and to serve the community by strengthening

its traditions, ideals, and solidarity. It aimed to foster cooperative learning

and action-based learning, strong links between schools and communities,

and cooperation among teachers and students, among students, and

among parents and students. It eliminated the school schedule and exami-

nations, fostered bilingual education, the arts, and physical education, and

eliminated content areas unrelated to life in the villages. The school was

organized around a cluster. A number of small rural schools were attached

to a cluster school. The clusters, named nucleo escolar campesino,included

centers of literacy and popular education, technical schools, and teacher-

training “normal” schools. This model extended to several dozen clusters,

but was ﬁercely opposed by landowners and ﬁnally eliminated in 1941.

In 1932,Mexico’s Secretary of Education Moises Saenz (a former student

of John Dewey at Columbia University) initiated experiments in education

in indigenous languages and a pilot project to promote self-reliance, polit-

ical organization, and mobilization of indigenous groups in Michoac

an.

This experiment, admired later by President L

azaro C

ardenas, led to the

creation of a separate Department for Indigenous Affairs

under C

ardenas’s

regime. The experiment itself was short-lived.

arez and Comboni, ed., Sistema educativo nacional de Bolivia.

Guillermo de la Pe

na, “Educaci

on y cultura en el M

exico del siglo 20,” cited by Pablo Latapi “Un

siglo de educaci

on nacional,” in P. Latapi, ed., Un siglo de educaci

on en Mexico (Mexico, 1998), 43–83.

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Education and Social Progress 473

In 1968, the socialist regime of General Velasco Alvarado in Peru included

indigenous and rural education as an important component of the educa-

tion reform. Education was to foster the process of organization of comu-

nidades agr

ıcolas campesinas through the creation of education clusters that

would work as centers of adult education and organization. In addition, the

content of the curricula was changed to reﬂect nationalistic values, which

celebrated the indigenous contribution to Peruvian identity. Bilingual edu-

cation was a component of this reform, including experiments to teach

Quechua and Aymara as second languages to Spanish speaking children.

This reform was ﬁercely opposed by the Peruvian urban middle and upper

classes as well as by the landowners who lost their land in the associated

land reform.

Progressives targeting the education of indigenous children also advo-

cated organizing teacher-training schools speciﬁcally to educate indigenous

teachers. Bolivia, in the 1931 Plan of Teacher Education, called for the

creation of normal schools for indigenous teachers. With the creation of

the Department of Indigenous Affairs in Mexico in the 1940s, indigenous

teacher-training schools were created. These schools, and the administrative

units in charge of implementing programs speciﬁcally for indigenous chil-

dren, have barely survived the open and covert confrontation of the state.

Throughout most of the century, when schools reached the localities

where indigenous children lived, teaching occurred in a language that

the children did not understand. Language policy was assimilationist and

denied the value of indigenous cultures and languages. By teaching indige-

nous children in a foreign language, and doing that poorly, with badly

trained teachers and in impoverished conditions, schools served to legit-

imize the subordinate role of indigenous communities. Throughout most

of the twentieth century, bilingual education programs in Latin America

have been variations of a policy of “castellanization” where instruction in the

mother tongue is used to transition the child into the dominant language,

to eventually abandon the mother tongue.

Notice that in other parts of the world, such as Canada, Spain, Switzerland, or parts of the United

States, bilingual education is not transitional but is “two-way,” meaning it is designed to develop full

competency in two or more languages in speakers of either language. Two-way bilingual education

is predicated on a model that sees cultural diversity as a strength. Transitional bilingual education

accepts the dominance of one language and one culture over another and seeks to teach children

these codes of power, at the expense of their cultural identity. That I consider the introduction of

transitional bilingual education as a progressive practice underscores the relativity of the concept

of progressive. By reference to a status quo where indigenous children were immersed in a foreign

language, the dominant practice throughout most of the century, transitional bilingual education is

aprogressive innovation. The progressive nature of policies to expand educational opportunity to

indigenous children in ways that robbed them of an indigenous identity is clearly questionable.

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474 Fernando Reimers

Nowhere is the large role played by broader societal values and institu-

tions in mediating the implementation of education policy more apparent

than with regard to the policies aimed at improving the opportunities of

students of indigenous descent. Consequently, nowhere is the gap between

policy rhetoric and implementation practice larger.

During a visit I made to Chile in June of 2003, the education representa-

tive of the Ministry of Education in Temuco (the poorest province in Chile,

with the highest concentration of indigenous people, Mapuches) described

the challenges faced by Mapuche students. He explained that there was a

growing number of Mapuche high school graduates who had the necessary

scores to pass the university entrance examinations but who did not have

the economic means to go to college. The number of scholarships available

to support these students was extremely limited and not growing. He said,

“this is an issue that is politically explosive. It is only a matter of time until

these students realize that they have the skills and the desire to be college

educated but that they live in a society that denies them this opportunity.

I can’t understand how our political leadership does not see this.” When

pressed to explain why there were not more initiatives focused on college

access of Mapuches, he expanded, “I often think that deep down we don’t

really believe that Mapuches have the same rights as other people. Aqui a

nadie le importan los Mapuches, y en Santiago menos.Noone will tell you

this openly, perhaps we’ll admit this among very close friends, but I think

that is the real reason why they face such poor odds.”

The view that many highly educated individuals were relatively indiffer-

ent was conﬁrmed by the administrators and teachers of a high school for

indigenous students described subsequently. They explained that most uni-

versity graduates in Chile have very limited sensitivity toward the indige-

nous theme. This high school, run by the Catholic Church, had been

selected by the Ministry of Education as one of the anticipation high

schools, a ﬂagship national program to foster excellence in secondary edu-

cation (liceos Montegrande). The managers and teaching staff of this high

school said it represented the vanguard of intercultural education in the

country and that a good proportion of their students were children of

Mapuche leaders. Although the quality of the facilities of this high school

was impressive, the quality of instruction was not. In this high school, stu-

dents were trained to be “assistant preschool teachers,” “assistant nurses,”

and other similar occupations. No one among the staff was able to explain

what the demand was for such occupations nor what kind of wages those

graduates would command. It was made clear that the focus was not to

prepare students for college entrance.

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Education and Social Progress 475

Amid a rhetoric of teaching students to be proud of their native lan-

guage and cultural heritage and to develop self-esteem, we found a school

culture of low academic expectations where students were engaged in low-

order cognitive tasks. We found students in the track of assistant preschool

teachers engaged doing handicrafts, and one class of students of assistant

nurses playing and talking with each other as the teacher devoted his time

to talk to four of them in a corner of the classroom. I interviewed a former

teacher of this school, a Mapuche woman with a masters degree, who was

very upfront in her criticism of the school. She said: “I know this school

very well for I worked there seven years. Like the rest of the few Mapuche

teachers in that school it pained me to see that we received the brightest

Mapuche children and condemned them to occupations without future.

Once some teachers in the school proposed creating an option to educate

maids, the argument being that so many of our graduates ended up as

maids in Santiago. I was furious and opposed it ...Iwenttothe newspa-

pers. Eventually I was pushed out of the school ...The option to educate

maids was not approved after all but I suppose it makes no difference, that’s

what many of the graduates of this high school end up doing anyway.” The

persistence of race-based gaps in educational achievement, as well as the

persistence of income-based achievement gaps, was indicative of the failure

of the education reforms of the twentieth century to live up to the rhetoric

of the policies promising equal educational opportunity.

In Brazil, language test scores of fourth grade black students in 2001

were two thirds of a standard deviation below the scores of white students.

Whereas only 12 percent of the black students in this grade can read at an

intermediate or higher level, 36 percent of the white students can read at

those levels.

In Mexico, language test scores of sixth-grade students in indigenous

schools are two thirds of a standard deviation below the scores of students

in rural schools and a full standard deviation below the scores of students

in urban public schools.

During the last decade of the century, a different set of targeted poli-

cies were advanced by governments with support of international agencies.

Paula Louzano, “Racial Inequalities in Brazilian Primary Education,” presented at the Annual Con-

ference of the Comparative and International Education Society, Stanford, CA, March 22–26,

2005.

Most scholarship describes the inﬂuence of multilateral organizations as a single phenomenon, char-

acterizing it as the expression of a “neoliberal” project. I believe this aggregation fails to capture

adequately the speciﬁc channels and purposes of these inﬂuences and fails to recognize the hetero-

geneity of points of view between and within international agencies.

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476 Fernando Reimers

The onset of the debt crisis and the adjustment era of the 1980s inaugu-

rated a new kind of role for international actors and inﬂuence. As local

elites built alliances with external groups and agencies favoring the inte-

gration of Latin America into the world economy, two related but differ-

ent processes of inﬂuence on the education sector gained importance.

The principal mechanism of inﬂuence was the economic adjustment pro-

cess itself and the international actors it empowered. Advocates of “shock

therapy” to close the ﬁscal and trade gaps unintentionally caused signiﬁ-

cant harm to education systems. Pressed between the rock of a cartel of

creditors and ﬁnancial institutions and the hard place of the entrenched

interests of the most powerful domestic political groups, governments

slashed education budgets, often disproportionately to the budget cuts

that were administered elsewhere across the public sector. The best teach-

ers and administrators who believed they had brighter prospects elsewhere,

or who were simply too demoralized to continue to teach impoverished

children in deteriorating schools, left the profession. Entire education

systems were set back as a result of this inﬂuence of ﬁscal austerity and

adjustment.

At the end of the twentieth century, Latin American nations were spend-

ing signiﬁcantly less on education than the OECD countries. At the primary

level, for example, the OECD spends 19 percent of GDP per capita per

student. This is also the level of spending of the United States, compared

with 12 percent in Argentina and Brazil, 17 percent in Chile, and 11 percent

in Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay.

A secondary, more complex, process of inﬂuence resulted from inter-

national institutions funding loans to ﬁnance education reform. Although

international ﬁnancing of education projects did not originate with the

adjustment era, in a context of declining education budgets, the funds

from loans and grants acquired a new importance. International agencies

thus gained more leverage to inﬂuence the speciﬁcs of education policy,

even though the proportion of education budgets funded with loans was

Ernesto Trevino, and German Trevino, “Estudio sobre las desigualdades educativas en Mexico: la

incidencia de la escuela en el desempeno academico de los alumnus y el rol de los docents,” (Colecci

cuadernos de investigaci

on #5,Instituto Nacional para la Evaluacion de la Educaci

on, Mexico, 2004).

Fernando Reimers, “The Impact of Economic Stabilization and Adjustment on Education in Latin

America,” Comparative Education Review 35:2 (May 1991): 319–53; Deuda externa y ﬁnanciamiento de la

educaci

on. Su impacto en Latinoam

erica (Santiago, 1990); and “Education and Structural Adjustment

in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa,” International Journal of Education and Development 14:2

(1993): 119–29.

OECD, Education at a Glance. OECD Indicators. 2001 (Paris, 2002), 68.

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Education and Social Progress 477

modest. Between 1991 and 1997,World Bank loans accounted for less than

3 percent of education budgets in Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Colombia,

Mexico, Panama, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. The highest levels of edu-

cation budgets funded with World Bank loans during the period were in

Bolivia (7%), Chile (5%), Dominican Republic (6%), Nicaragua (8%), and

Paraguay (12%). Latin America and the Caribbean received a total of more

than US$1 billion per year for education between 1990 and 1994, with

loans from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank

accounting for about three fourths of this total.

Education specialists working in these agencies represented a diversity

of views and were as likely to favor conservative as progressive projects. As

aresult of this diversity, these loans funded projects representing diverse

objectives and approaches. They funded a number of experiments to sup-

port privatization, decentralization, and school autonomy, which converged

with the efforts to tinker with efﬁciency that during the 1980sreplaced the

interest in educational expansion of the previous decades. However, they

also funded projects to expand access and to improve quality in disadvan-

taged communities consistent with the progressive agenda.

During the last decade of the century, another set of transnational actors

supported progressive initiatives. They included United Nations organi-

zations, particularly UNESCO, UNICEF, and the Economic Commis-

sion for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), which reacted to the

perception that the adjustment of the 1980s had eroded the social gains

made since the 1950s. These organizations called attention to educational

development worldwide, articulated in 1990 during the World Confer-

ence on Education for All convened in Jomtien, Thailand, and a series

of follow-up conferences culminating with another World Conference on

Education in Dakkar in 2000.

These institutions built coalitions with

nongovernmental organizations. Together, these actors worked to inﬂuence

national priorities along lines consistent with the progressive project. The

last decade of the twentieth century began with a highly inﬂuential report

jointly authored by the ECLAC and the regional ofﬁce of UNESCO calling

for renewed attention to education reform as the foundation for economic

competitiveness with equity. Soon after, the governments of Argentina,

Chile, Mexico, and Uruguay launched policies to improve the quality of

Robert McMeekin, Coordination of External Assistance to Education in Latin America and the

Caribbean (Santiago, 1995).

Karen Mundy and Lynn Murphy,“Transnational Advocacy, Global Civil Society? Emerging Evidence

from the Field of Education,” Comparative Education Review (February 2001).

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478 Fernando Reimers

the schools attended by marginalized children. The emphasis on education

as a strategy to reduce poverty was reiterated at every regional meeting of

senior education ofﬁcials. In 1998, the presidential summit of the Americas

made education the key theme in its signed declaration, highlighting the

links with poverty reduction.

Consistent with this new emphasis in policy as the century ended, gov-

ernments in several countries supported initiatives to increase equity in

education. Typically, these equity reforms were embedded in larger educa-

tion reforms, which sought to increase quality and efﬁciency.

For example, after the demise of the military dictatorship in Chile in 1991,

the Ministry of Education began to talk about positive discrimination – the

disproportionate attention to marginalized schools – as a strategy to achieve

equity in education. Soon after, government documents of Argentina and

Mexico also explicitly highlighted compensatory policies as one of the

strategies to achieve equity in education.

The actions that have been supported as part of reforms to increase

equity aimed to improve the basic conditions in schools attended by low-

income children. These include changes in funding formula to increase

per-pupil expenditures in marginalized schools, as in Brazil; construction

or repair of facilities to expand access; and more and better instructional

materials. Efforts to expand access have also included developing alternative

modalities to offer some educational opportunities to low-income students

such as various modalities of distance secondary education in rural areas in

El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico or various forms of community-based

courses to expand access in marginalized rural areas.

Other policies in this group have supported teacher education, teacher

guides, and infrastructure, primarily in schools attended by the poor, such

as a series of programs to improve marginalized rural and urban schools in

Mexico; the Escuela Nueva program in Colombia to enhance the quality of

rural schools; and the program to enhance the quality of the schools with

lowest levels of student achievement, the P900 program in Chile.

Because these reforms have taken place embedded in larger efforts seek-

ing overall improvement in efﬁciency and quality, and because the level

of resources destined for inputs speciﬁcally targeted to poor students is

arelatively small component of the overall level of resources for educa-

tional improvement, often these reforms have succeeded at improving the

conditions of schools attended by poor children without closing the gap

between these and other schools in the system. Improvements, however,

have been modest. Another popular policy option to support the education

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Education and Social Progress 479

of marginalized children during the 1990s was conditional cash transfers,

scholarship programs intended to provide incentives to poor families to

keep their children in school. These programs were implemented on a

large scale during the 1990sinBrazil and Mexico, and on a smaller scale in

a number of other countries, including Argentina, Colombia, Guatemala,

Honduras, and Nicaragua. Aside from their welfare objectives, to pro-

vide income to families in extreme poverty, these programs were mainly

intended to encourage school attendance, assuming that once in school

children would learn valuable skills. In this sense, they were, as many other

efforts during the twentieth century, helpful to support school attendance

but limited in their effectiveness to inﬂuence learning, particularly because

many of the children receiving these scholarships attended schools of dismal

quality as discussed in this chapter.

CONCLUSIONS

Educational opportunity expanded during the twentieth century in Latin

America. In some ways it expanded more dramatically than at any other

time in the region’s history. It did not, however, expand signiﬁcantly enough

to reduce the unequal distribution of education among different social

groups or to close the gaps between Latin America and the OECD.

Absent throughout most of the century was a priority to give the chil-

dren of the poor equal opportunities to attend schools, high schools, and

universities where they would be supported to learn content to empower

them to have signiﬁcantly better options than their parents to participate in

society. Toward the end of the century, policy discourse, and some action,

indicated that some policy elites were once again considering this objective

but mostly at the basic levels of education.

Close examination of the links between policy rhetoric and results

demonstrates that education policy matters. What states and societies

decide to do, how they deﬁne priorities and the programs, and actions

they undertake and support have transformed, in part, schools and the

education proﬁle of the population. The citizens of Latin America have

more years of schooling today than a century ago. Most of them declare

themselves literate, whereas many of their ancestors a century ago could

not read. Most are more likely to reach higher levels of schooling than their

parents. Women have gained more than men from this intergenerational

educational mobility in the region.

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480 Fernando Reimers

During the twentieth century, education systems in Latin America

changed much and changed little at the same time. They changed much

because they expanded – always as part of larger political projects. They

changed little because they relied on a dominant model of schooling that

did not help many children learn much and because internal and external

educational gaps remained unchanged. The purpose to make schools teach

all children at high levels so they could be competent democratic citizens

was frequently challenged by the purpose to have schools either serve the

narrower purpose of training workers for the jobs of the past or to edu-

cate different children for differing purposes. The tension between having

schools reproduce the authoritarian past versus building a different, more

democratic future undermined the ability of schools to teach much to poor

children.

Educational opportunity remained an elusive concept, the result of nego-

tiation and conﬂict between two competing ideologies, which had emerged

at independence: a conservative set of ideas that saw education as a means

to preserve privilege, and a progressive alternative that saw education as the

foundation to build more inclusive societies. Politics were the dominant

force that deﬁned how these two competing views were negotiated. These

politics were initially domestic, but as the region opened up (again) to

integrate into the world economy, they were increasingly global. Domestic

politics reﬂected the struggles of national stakeholders and issues as well

as micro-education politics, when particular education stakeholders were

mobilized to advance their interests. Domestic political actors developed

transnational alliances to support their position. Domestic education poli-

tics, however, were dominated by large national corporate interests (states,

political parties, businesses, and unions) and had little room for teachers,

parents, students, and local communities or social movements. Transna-

tional alliances supported renewed attention to equal educational opportu-

nity as human rights and development organizations helped focus attention

on the dismally low learning chances of poor children in a region where

culture, history, and institutions were at odds with the simple democratic

idea that all children can learn at high levels and to think for themselves

and that it is important that they do.

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Part IV

SECTORAL DEVELOPMENT

AND EQUITY

481