Overview

Education in Latin America today is largely a product of what the Spanish began in the colonial period. Yet, there were pre-Conquest institutions and organized modes of learning. Indigenous people learned from their parents and acquired skills through a system of apprenticeship. The Aztecs also required youth at age 15 to attend school. The majority attended the telpochalli, for military education and the elite went to the calmecac, for advanced study of writing, astronomy, and theology, among other topics. As part of the destruction of indigenous governments and institutions, the Spanish replaced these schools with European-style education systems.

The first schools established in the sixteenth century were aimed at Christianizing the local population. These were established by the Catholic Church, particularly the Dominican and Jesuit orders, who worked largely with children of privileged families. Jesuits opened and staffed numerous schools and colleges, wrote about historical matters and the various regions of the empire, and came to dominate the intellectual life of the times. The order administered ranches and forest rights, and used their considerable resources to train peasants in horticulture, weaving, reading, and writing. By the seventeenth century there were universities in Santiago de Chile, Córdoba, La Plata, Cuzco, and Quito, most of which trained clergy as well as some doctors and lawyers. By the eighteenth century chairs of classical and Indian languages were added to natural science and after the expulsion of the Jesuits for fear of their dominance in the New World, higher education exhibited a new secularism that reflected the philosophy and influence of the Enlightenment.

The dominance of scholasticism was being challenged by a new introduction of science and the empirical method. The effort to rationalize the doctrines of the church by wedding philosophy and theology yielded to the new ideas which rejected the notion of using reason to justify faith. When the Jesuits departed, they left a legacy of some twenty-five institutions of higher education in Latin America. The importance of some of these continued for at least two centuries. While most of the population during the colonial period could neither read nor write, the cultural life of the times produced a number of celebrated intellectuals. Among these notables may be included Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566), author of History of the Indies, and Bernal Díaz Del Castillo (1492–1584), known for his True History of the Conquest of New Spain.

After the Independence movement the Catholic Church remained a dominant influence in education but gradually this control was eroded by the demands of citizens for a more enlightened intellectual atmosphere and by the end of the century secularism dominated schooling in the area. Major advances in education were made particularly in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, where a combination of citizen demand and the need for more technical training eroded the rigidity of church doctrine. Under President Domingo Sarmiento, Argentina became the educational leader in Latin America. But the introduction of more scientific studies at the expense of humanism also brought an increase in state control of education. Idealism was replaced by positivism and the curriculum no longer required Latin. In Mexico President Benito Juárez's educational reform commission, influenced by Comte's philosophy, aimed at a new way to train elites. In Argentina the Escuela Normal de Panana, created in 1870, provided a training ground for the new leaders of society. By the end of the nineteenth century secularism had overtaken Catholic control in all of Latin America and was codified by the Argentine law of 1884, which settled the matter.

What appeared at the end of the nineteenth century was a varied system of education that reflected diverse European influences. Argentina was influenced by the British system, Chile by the German, and many other Latin American countries by the French. National governments established ministries of education to run the schools, and a system of hierarchical levels of administration created a pattern that is only now being seriously challenged. Though literacy grew, the rigid class divisions that characterized Latin American society remained. Both internal as well as external developments helped to influence change in early-twentieth-century schooling. In Córdoba in 1918 the new middle classes succeeded in making the university more democratic by including research and student participation in university affairs. Here, too, improved teaching and a new curriculum was influenced by radical ideas inspired by the Mexican and Russian revolutions. Militant student strikes led by the student union incited an examination reform, an end to nepotism, and social accountability.

This new radicalism was reflected in Mexico during the 1930s, when left-leaning teachers were urged to become social reformers by playing a role in rural uplift. They were asked to help the peasants struggle for land and to help the workers struggle for wages. President Lázaro Cárdenas demanded a school in every village; while the program proved successful in Oaxaca, in other areas teachers often faced popular indifference and even hostility. Despite these changes all over Spanish America, a centralized and standardized form of primary education persisted and was promoted from the 1930s onward. Municipalities lost control of schools to the ministries of education, which assumed control of teacher recruitment, training, and placement and inspection. This policy was justified in the name of using education to develop the nation and establish national identity. Despite these national efforts, fully half the population of Latin America remained illiterate in 1964. In all countries after World War II the attraction of education was a force that increased enrollments substantially, and resources were poured into schools.

In Brazil there were 2.1 million students in 1932, with 2 million in primary schools, 103,000 in secondary, and 22,000 in higher education. By 1985 there were 30 million students, with 1.5 million in higher education. While questions of enrollment, resources, and national development are still important concerns of educators and politicians in Latin America, the more recent global competitive environment has added new dimensions to traditional views of education.

Global political and economic changes have altered traditional views of education in Latin America and throughout the world. The increasing interdependence of trade, commerce, and finance now challenges the conventional view of education as an exclusive function of sovereign states and leads to a reassessment of the broader objectives of education in an internationally competitive environment. Organizations such as the United Nations, the Organization of American States, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development routinely play significant roles as advisors and consultants to national ministries. This development has brought about the in clusion of new educational concepts, such as gender issues, environmental problems, human rights, the cultural integrity of indigenous people, and the disparity between the technical and scientific work forces in poor versus developed economies. With these increased demands have come the recognition that government resources are inadequate. International lending institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank insist that officials find ways to curtail expenditure, increase taxes, and consider user fees and more privatization of schooling. However, these policy reforms have met resistance. For instance, in 1999, the rector of the National Autonomous University of Mexico tried to raise fees, but a group of students launched a strike disrupting classes for several months. While many Mexicans found the strikers' demands unreasonable and the federal government arrested the protesters, the activities did limit privatization attempts.

The South Commission (1990), for example, pointed to the widening "knowledge gap" between developed countries and the third world. In their report, they found that "unless the South learns to harness the forces of modern science and technology, it has no chance of fulfilling its developmental aspirations or its yearning for an effective voice in the management of global interdependence." The information age, with its requirements for technical and scientific workers, demands a more competitive population six to fifteen years old than was ever required in the past. Latin American ministries of education are now called upon to emphasize basic science and mathematics preparation as never before.

This emphasis is not just for an elite, but rather for a much wider population of children. The World Education Report issued by UNESCO in 1993 calls for making education for all a universal reality, not just a universally recognized right. Many nations have moved forward in providing primary schooling for most of their eligible population. However, Bolivia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and others have not succeeded in providing even this minimal level of education for all children. At the secondary level, usually considered appropriate for ages twelve to seventeen, no country in Latin America reported very high enrollment ratios. Cuba led the list with 85 percent, followed by Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, but many countries barely had a third of eligible students enrolled. Other statistics underline the severe diversity that characterizes educational attainment in Latin America. The illiterate population of persons over fifteen years of age rises from single-digit percentages in Argentina, Costa Rica, and Uruguay to very high rates in Guatemala and Nicaragua. Countries with the highest college and university enrollment ratios have the smallest number of illiterates, and those countries with the lowest ratios have the highest rates of illiteracy. These national figures do not reveal the kinds of disparities between rural and urban areas or among marginalized indigenous populations.

More important, perhaps, than the numbers of children receiving instruction is the changing philosophical outlook of government, from a traditional acceptance of exclusive governmental responsibility to a broader social mandate for meeting educational needs that includes the family, the workplace, the media, and other community organizations. The traditional role of schooling as an instrument for molding social personality and work-force training for human capital are being eroded by a new focus on alternate agencies of education.

The Chilean Ministry of Education enunciated a program in 1992 to improve the quality of primary schools by inviting the community to participate actively in the education of their children. Some educators see this development as an opportunity for greater democratization whereby citizens help establish their own priorities. The International Institute for Educational Planning sponsored a study of decentralization in Latin America in which the older view of exclusive governmental responsibility is altered by the need for broader citizen participation in education. This trend is also evident in the development of rural women's education in the Andean subregion, as reported by the International Bureau of Education. It is increasingly recognized that the rights of indigenous people have been neglected in many countries, and that they have legitimate cross-national concerns that need to be addressed by local and international agencies. In Peru, for example, the 1979 Constitution established that peasant and native communities are autonomous in their organization and community work, although these populations do not feel that they have equal rights to education, health, and other government services. Efforts are currently under way to institute bilingual schools, train teachers in their native language, and provide expanded instruction for the indigenous population.

By the 1960s and 1970s a new genre of educational criticism had emerged in North and South America, taking as its starting point the apparent inability of governments to make schools alter social injustice and poverty. Critics such as Everett Reimer, Paulo Freire, and Ivan Illich carefully detailed the ways that schools served to perpetuate privilege in general and specifically in Latin America. They concluded that the formal school system could not be saved and instead called for a whole new "informal" system that would educate children outside the regular classroom.

See alsoDíaz del Castillo, Bernal; Dominicans; Freire, Paulo; International Monetary Fund (IMF); Jesuits; Las Casas, Bartolomé de; Literacy; United Nations; Universities: Colonial Spanish America; Universities: The Modern Era; World Bank.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

John Johnson, Political Change in Latin America (1958).

Harold R. W. Benjamin, Higher Education in the American Republics (1965).

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968).

Everett Reimer, School Is Dead: Alternatives in Education (1970).

Joseph Maier and Richard W. Weatherhead, eds., The Latin American University (1979).

Mary Kay Vaughan, The State, Education and Social Class in Mexico, 1880–1928 (1982).

United Nations, Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989).

South Commission, The Challenge to the South (1990), pp. 227-228.

World Declaration on Education for All (conference in Jomtien, Thailand, 1990).

Chilean Ministry Of Education, "Programme to Improve the Quality of Primary Schools in Poor Areas," in Bulletin of the Major Project of Education in Latin America and the Caribbean, no. 27 (1992): 30-31.

Beatrice Edwards, "Linking the Social and Natural Worlds: Environmental Education in the Hemisphere," in La Educación, no. 115 (1993).

International Bureau of Education, Innovation and Information (December 1993): 4.

Nelly Stromquist, "The Political Experience of Women: Linking Micro and Macro-Democracies," in La Educación, no. 116 (1993).

UNESCO, Statistical Yearbook (1993).

World Bank, Development Data Book, 2d ed., n.d.

United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report (1993).

International Institute for Educational Planning, IIEP Newsletter XII, no. 1 (1994).

British Comparative Education Society, Conference on Education Beyond the State, September 1994.

Additional Bibliography

Babb, Sarah L. Managing Mexico: Economists from Nationalism to Neoliberalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Ball, Stephen J., Gustavo E. Fischman, and Silvina Gvirtz. Crisis and Hope: The Educational Hopscotch of Latin America. New York: Routledge Falmer, 2003.

Britton, John A., ed. Molding the Hearts and Minds: Education, Communications, and Social Change in Latin America Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1994.

Castro, Cláudio de Moura, and Daniel C. Levy. Myth, Reality, and Reform: Higher Education Policy in Latin America. Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank, 2000.

Cortina, Regina, and Nelly P. Stromquist, eds. Distant Alliances: Promoting Education for Girls and Women in Latin America. New York: Falmer Press, 2000.

Di Gropello, Emanuela, Rossella Cominetti, and Roberto Bisang. La descentralización de la educación y la salud: Un análisis comparativo de la experiencia latinoamericana. Santiago: Naciones Unidas, 1998.

Puiggrós, Adriana. Neoliberalism and Education in the Americas. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999.

Reimers, Fernando, ed. Unequal Schools, Unequal Chances: The Challenges to Equal Opportunity in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University, 2000.

Reunión Regional sobre la Educación Superior de los Pueblos Indígenas de América Latina (Guatemala City, 2002). La educación superior indígena en América Latina. Caracas: UNESCO: Instituto Internacional de la Educación Superior en América Latina y el Caribe (IESALC), 2003.

Téllez, Magaldy, ed. Educación, cultura y política: Ensayos para la comprensión de la historia de la educación en América Latina. Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Sociales, Facultad de Humanidades y Educación, 1997.

                                            Joseph Di Bona