Improving Latin America’s Schools
Indeed, the weakness of its K-12 educational system is the primary reason why Brazil is now facing a major shortage of skilled workers. The same problem has arisen in Panama, a country that is booming despite the poor quality of its schools.
Thankfully, the campaign for education reform is gaining steam across Latin America. “In country after country,” Gabriel Sánchez Zinny, managing director of Blue Star Strategies, observed recently, “Latin American businesses are teaming up with NGOs and governments to deliver better educational outcomes.”
He listed several examples. In Brazil, the continent’s biggest media conglomerate is funding a program that offers “government-accredited, complete elementary education through free television programming and accompanying materials such as books and DVDs.” In Mexico, a nonprofit organization helped finance a 2012 documentary highlighting the obstacles to a better Mexican education system. The film, which paints a damning portrait of the Mexican national teachers’ union and its leader, Elba Esther Gordillo, generated enormous buzz in Mexico, sparking a passionate debate and “outdrawing Oscar-winning features,” according to the Los Angeles Times. Meanwhile, the private sector is expanding Internet access via a massive laptop initiative in Nicaragua, and energy companies are sponsoring scholarships and other educational programs in Colombia.
Even those Latin American and Caribbean countries that ranked highest in the World Economic Forum survey are working hard to bolster their schools. Take my native Costa Rica. “In 2010,” reports the Legatum Institute, “over 80 percent of respondents expressed both satisfaction with their local educational institutions and believed that Costa Rican children have sufficient opportunities to learn and grow every day.” Yet the country still needs far more of its students to complete high school and some form of college: “The typical Costa Rican worker has undertaken just under a year of both secondary and tertiary education.” Since 2006, Costa Rica has used a conditional cash-transfer program (similar to Brazil’s Bolsa Família and Mexico’s Oportunidades) to reduce its high-school dropout rate.
Such programs should be expanded wherever possible. Latin America must also place a stronger emphasis on math and science education, given its innovation deficit, its need to create more technology-based jobs, and its need to keep up with the emerging economies of Asia. Finally, it must harness the current momentum and encourage the private sector to become more involved in educational initiatives (such as scholarship and Internet programs).
If Latin American countries take these steps, they will greatly enhance their ability to compete in a 21st-century global economy.
(Read this article in Spanish here.)
North Americans, on the whole, were far better informed and educated before we even had any public schools.
Public schools are nothing more than government indoctrination centers.
Socialized education doesn’t work any better than socialized medicine.
Higher literacy and math can only help to give those kids better lives.
I wish the all well.
The student protests in Chile are led by celebrity fluffy communist, Camila Vega. The Chilean version of Occupy. She has parlayed her position as a student leader to celebrity status.
The Chilean media loves her because she is quite pretty.
@1389AD
Don’t let spite at Nordamerican public schools pollute the whole notion of public schooling. A lot of the oh-so celebrated countries where education is reputedly of the highest caliber in the world got that way thanks to public education.
Best argument for it that’s stuck in my mind? “Before public education, Scotland was the armpit of the intellectual world. After public schooling was installed, the country produced Adam Smith and [insert a longer list of scientists, medical doctors and philosophers than I can remember].”
If implementing a good system in the US turns out a malformed, perverted monstrosity of the original idea, it still doesn’t mean that the original idea was wrong. It merely suggests that the States are more thoroughly rotten than too many generations of Americans have been willing to admit. Even to themselves.
Sounds as though they wish to go the same path as the U.S. has. If they’d like to start a little farther back in our history I’d have no problem with it.
I’m not sure exactly when it happened but those running K-12 schools decided that all students had to go to college, no ifs, ands or buts. So every student in school was given a curriculum aiming that way. The problem was……………….. not everyone wants to go to college. Some wish to go to college, some would like business training and others would like voc training such as learning plumbing, carpenter work, electrical work, etc. Makes no difference. You go to school and head for college.
People are not one size fits all even though Liberals think you can push all these little triangles, rectangles and squares into round holes. If the educators in these Latin American schools are smart, they’ll make sure their students at least have these options. Perhaps more of them will graduate from school that way.
They might also pay attention to the fact that if the possibility of higher learning is seen, people will value it more and work harder to attain their goal if their path isn’t made too easy.