Standard education in Bolivia
Standard Education in Bolivia
In Bolivia, standard education (primary and secondary education) has gone through transformations that reflect the changes in the socio-political authority of the country. Bolivia’s colonization by Spain in 1525 not only led to these transformations but also changed the demographic composition of the country, which is today 55% Indigenous (comprising 35 different groups), 30% Mestizo and 15% Hispanic. The different educational policies in Bolivia reflect the power struggle the Indigenous endured as the marginalised class in society from having limited access to education from 1525, to having the right to an education in 1955 under the Code of Bolivian Education, and to finally have a greater input in the creation of the national curriculum in 1994 under the Educational Reform.
Pre-Colonial Education: 2000 BC
The first civilisation in Bolivia existed 2000 years BC. Child education amongst the various indigenous populations during this era revolved primarily around teaching about indigenous culture, and core communal or familial held values, through daily chores. Examples of core values included solidarity and cooperation and examples of daily chores included agriculture and livestock maintenance, as well as fabric work[1]. Children were introduced to social life early on and were expected to work together with older members of the community towards a collective goal.
Education in Colonial Bolivia: 1525-1825
Spain colonised Bolivia during its Explorational Era in 1525, and occupied it for the following 300 years.[2] The Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church justified the colonisation of Bolivia by saying that Indigenous religions and cultures were barbaric and primitive, and needed to be destroyed.[2] Therefore Spanish missionaries were tasked to teach young Indigenous people about Christianity.[3] The first school in Bolivia was founded in La Paz by a Spanish Priest called Alfonso Bárgano in 1571 and was open only to the son’s of: colonial officials, Criollos and Indigenous chiefs. Education was limited for the Indigenous population because the Spanish colonials believed that educated natives would threaten their authority[4]. Therefore the goal of the Spanish colonials was to educate the Indigenous elites to be “good and obedient subjects”[4].
Education Following Independence: 1825
It was after Bolivia’s civil revolution in 1952, rather than its independence in 1825, that policies were implemented to change the colonial education system. Prior to the revolution, there was an attempt to create a school system based on Indigenous knowledge and traditions. This effort was led by an Aymaran chief called Avelino Siñani and a hispanic teacher called Elizardo Pérez. They established the Warisata Ayllu School in 1931, and its pedagogy was fully based on Indigenous knowledge, language, and values, with the purpose of helping Indigenous students to develop self-sustaining and cooperative skills[5]. Hispanic landowners were against the education system because they were afraid of losing workers. This was because the education system taught about agriculture, which would make Indigenous communities less reliant on working for a living. Since white landowners were part of Bolivia's elite, they were able to persuade the government to close the school in 1940 on the grounds that it was upsetting the country's social order [6][7].
Indigenous communities continued to demand standard education for three major reasons.The first reason was raised by the Indigenous community and their leaders, which was the importance of literacy “so as not to be deceived by the traders from town”[8]. This was because Spanish traders often took advantage of Indigenous farmers by using their weights and measures incorrectly to pay Indigenous farmers less than the quantity of crops they were selling. The second reason, which was raised by Indigenous parents, was the importance of learning Spanish in order to find a job and live in the urban areas. Although Indigenous leaders perceived this as abandoning cultural values, many Indigenous parents believed this to be the only escape from poverty. This was because beginning in the 1930s, there were growing environmental challenges, such as decreasing rainfall, which reduced the already low profits from the agricultural labour of Indigenous farmers. The third reason, which was raised by Indigenous leaders, was that literacy as well as the knowledge taught by white teachers would allow Indigenous communities to acquire the “power of the other”[8]. What Indigenous leaders hoped by this was that after decades of oppression and segregation, understanding the knowledge and values of the elites would allow them to gain access into their socio-political and economic systems, from which the Indigenous people continued to be excluded from.
In addition to the elite landowners, the Teacher Union and other teacher associations advocated against the education of the Indigenous. This was because before the 1970s, teachers were all from the hispanic or Mestizo class, and most of them did not want to teach Indigenous children whom they considered to be a lower race and incapable of learning.[9]
Code of Bolivian Education 1955
The Revolution of 1952 removed the military junta from power, replacing it with the National Revolutionary Movement party (MRN). The MRN was a nationalist government that aimed to develop Bolivia by giving its lower classes more socio-political power. The MRN implemented various policies such as universal suffrage, agricultural reform, as well as reforming the educational system [9]. This reform was administered in 1955 under the Code of Bolivian Education and it gave the right to education for all, and created a public school system.
The government also put in place the Ministry of Peasant and Indian Affairs (MPIA) to be in charge of rural education, given that most Indigenous communities were located in rural areas at that time. Urban education remained the responsibility of the Ministry of Education[10] [11]. Both ministries were managed by the minority Hispanic elites, and had a centralised administration in La Paz[10]. The Code was made by the MPIA, universities, Teachers' Unions, and other labor groups, under the management of the Ministry of Education [9]. The commission had three major objectives regarding standard education, the first one being to create a unified population (Article 2:3) [9]. Indigenous children were educated to become Mestizo by teaching them aspects of Hispanic culture such as language, religion, philosophy, and science [9]. This goal was supported by many teachers who believed that “civilisation is something the Amerindian children do not possess but should aspire to” [12]. Therefore, there was a growing belief amongst the Hispanic and Mestizo population that changing Indigenous children’s ethnic identities was necessary not only to civilise them but also to create a Bolivian national identity [9].
Article 115 of the Code allowed the use of Indigenous languages only for Spanish literacy learning, and all other teaching was to be done only in Spanish [9].The reform focused on making education more accessible, rather than changing the curriculum. These were the only educational policies that the nationalist government put in place from 1955 to 1992.
Response to the Code 1955
The reform was criticised by several groups including the indigenous population, social and non-government organisations, as well as UNESCO (1970) and the World Bank (1983). The first of the three major limitations they identified was the unequal allocation of educational expenditure. Most of it was allocated to paying teacher’s salaries, and for their training. Teachers in urban areas were required four years of training, whereas those in rural areas were required only two months [13]. Critics also disliked the fact that little was invested to improve the quality of education by for example increasing and evenly distributing teaching materials throughout urban and rural schools, as well as providing rural teachers with the same training as urban ones. In fact, some rural schools had “no buildings, desks, books or instructional material” [14] [13].
The second aspect that was criticized was the high dropout and repeat rates, predominantly of Indegenous students. Critics blamed this on the long distances rural children, who were often malnourished, had to walk to access a school since there were only 200 primary schools by 1970. Most of these schools were located in urban areas. They also blamed dropout rates on the difficulty of learning for Indigenous students due to their lack of understanding of Spanish.[15] This factor was a major disappointment for Indigenous parents, many of whose children were completing highschool with a poor understanding of Spanish as well as their native languages.[15]An Indigenous parent remarked that “Quechua is only useful here between us, it’s of no use to them in the city. As for reading, my son can read [Spanish] correctly, but he can’t understand the reading or speak” [16] . Critics also said that the fact that the curriculum didn't take into account the culture of Indigenous students was a reason why so many of them dropped out. This meant that the subjects they were taught in schools were not applicable to their community life [15]. This cultural approach to education was resisted by a group of some of the first Indigenous alumni in the form of a manifesto known as the Tiwanaku Manifesto of 1973. The manifesto stated:
"The education [we receive] only seeks to convert the Indian into a species of mixed person without definition or personality, but it also pursues his assimilation into the western and capitalist culture" [17].
This group of Indigenous alumni voiced the frustration of Indigenous people in being deprived of an educational system that allowed them to strengthen their “way of life” [18]. They wanted to be involved in making decisions about education, as well as intercultural bilingual education (IBE) which would incorporate Indigenous history, languages, culture and values in the curriculum [18].
The third limitation critiqued particularly by the World Bank was the centralisation of the administrations of the rural and urban education systems in La Paz. The World Bank called this aspect "inefficient," because of the time-consuming processes required to implement decisions and the unequal distribution of resources between rural and urban schools [18].
The Educational Reform Law (LRE) 1994
The Educational Reform Law (LRE) which was passed in 1994 and implemented in1996, was the first law in Bolivia which aimed to make education more inclusive to Indigenous culture [19] . The government that put forward this law was once again the MRN party, headed by president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. Education reform was one of the three primary concerns Sánchez de Lozada campaigned with, along with Popular Participation and Capitalization [18]. The Reform was enacted under Law 1565 and it proposed radical changes in four major aspects of standard education: restructuring the educational system, incorporating intercultural and bilingual education (IBE), changing the pedagogical approach, and reforming teacher training. The Bolivian government was the first in South America to make IBE mandatory for all children. [19]
The MRN party defined intercultural education in Articles 1-6 of the National Education Reform as an education system which is culturally inclusive “because it is organised and developed with the participation of the whole society without restriction or discrimination”. [20][21] Article 9 defines bilingual as teaching with “a national indigenous language as the first language and Spanish as the second language” which was enforced in primary schools in areas with predominantly Indigenous people.[21] [20] Indigenous languages were taught as a secondary language in secondary schools, and in primary schools in areas with a predominantly Hispanic or Mestizo population.[21] Therefore, the government aimed to incorporate Indigenous languages in all levels of standard education, and to develop a curriculum together with different members of society in order for it to reflect the diverse knowledge and values of the entire country.
Drivers of the LRE (1994)
The limitations of the 1955 Code of Bolivian Education resulted in growing demands from various groups in society for an educational system that recognized and included Bolivia’s linguistic and cultural diversity in the 1960s. These demands were primarily from the Indegenous population in the rural areas who demanded better quality education, and to be involved in forming the educational curriculum in order to preserve their traditions and values to fight against ethnicization.[19] Similar demands were also voiced by different grassroots which included the Rural Teachers’ Union in 1984, the Bolivian Workers' Center in 1989, and the Peasant’s Labor Organization in the early 1990s.[18]
These demands came following the country’s democratization in 1983, prior to which, such demands were repressed by the various nationalist governments who sought to culturally assimilate the population into a single Mestizo race. [18] Urban teacher unions throughout the 1970s also opposed demands for IBE as they wanted to maintain their control on the curriculum, and they still possessed prejudices against Indigenous culture. [19] International events also influenced the Bolivian government to reform the educational system due to the growing global acknowledgment of the importance of education for development, which even led to the World Conference on Education for All in Jomtien in 1990.[22] Development organizations began investing in projects within the educational sectors in developing countries like Bolivia.[23]
One of the most influential of these projects in Bolivia was the Project of Intercultural Bilingual Education (PEIB), which was initiated by UNICEF and supported and funded by UNESCO as well as the World Bank, through its structural adjustment loan package to Bolivia.[18][19] The project was implemented between 1988 and 1994 and introduced bilingual education in 114 rural schools for Indigenous children in the Quechua, Aymara, and Guarani languages.[18] In 1994 PEIB carried out a study to assess the effects of bilingual education which revealed that Indigenous students taught in their mother tongue were more proficient than students from control schools in language and mathematics.[18]
Key Concepts of the LRE (1994)
The government of Sánchez de Lozada acknowledged these effects, basing the first of the two axes of the LRE on the PEIB. This axe aimed to expand the IBE aspect of the PEIB by introducing bilingual education in all schools and incorporating Indigenous knowledge and culture, rather than focusing solely on language as the PEIB had done. The second axe of the LRE was popular participation, which aimed to incorporate different members of society in the educational policy-making process.[18] This axe aimed to provide parents and grassroots movements, liaison committees, municipalities, school-management boards and central and local society with some power over “the local curriculum, infrastructure and school supplies”, which teachers no longer controlled alone.[19]
The government appointed the Technical Support Team of the Education Reform (ETARE) to design the reform. The ETARE was composed of “highly qualified Bolivian experts, assisted by external consultants, and received World Bank financial support and technical assistance” and were expected to consult with different social groups and organisations throughout their designing process.[24] The ETARE based their proposal of changing four aspects of standard education, mentioned above, on the two axes of the LRE.The Reform was enacted under Law 1565 and it proposed radical changes in four major aspects of primary education: incorporating intercultural and bilingual education (IBE), changing the curriculum, changing the pedagogical approach, and reforming teacher training.
In terms of incorporating IBE, the policy required a change in the cultural approach of the education system from assimilatory to intercultural, by respecting and incorporating the students' cultural identities.[24] To promote the public participation in the decision making process, the reform created education councils for parents, grassroots, community members, and indigenous people at the municipal level. The policy also decentralized the control over education infrastructure and the equipping of school supplies to the municipal level.[24] This policy changed the entire curriculum by supplying new teacher guides and student textbooks in Indigenous languages as well as in Spanish.
The policy also changed the pedagogical approach from rote learning and frontal instruction to teaching that focused on meeting fundamental learning requirements but also taking into account cultural, language, and individual differences.[24][19]
Lastly, the reform was meant to improve the 26 schools that trained teachers. Most of them were run inefficiently, had curricula that were often not relevant, and had very few students. The reform proposed appointing pedagogical advisors to implement all changes in schools and to provide teachers with on site training.[19]
Response to the LRE (1994)
Various groups viewed the implementation of the LRE in different ways. For instance, although UNESCO applauded the reform for being “the most innovative indegenous education reform” at the time of its implementation, the World Bank as well as Indegenous people, teachers and grassroots, voiced that more needed to be done to implement both axes of the reform.[18] A major complaint from the grassroots and the Indigenous population was that the involvement of international organizations and the control of the ETARE, which didn't include people from different social groups, meant that decisions were made from the top down instead of in a "participatory" way. The ETARE responded that anyone wishing to consult with them was welcome, and that Union representatives were often invited but refused.[18] Indigenous communities felt as though their lack of participation resulted in their knowledge not being adequately incorporated in the curriculum, which instead consisted of simplistic explanations of their traditions. Indigenous parents were however content with the pedagogical changes which prohibited the use of physical violence on their children as well as the denigration of Indigenous culture by teachers.[25]
The bilingual aspect of education was applauded by parents and teachers for improving the learning of students. However, poor implementation of the policies resulted in the textbooks and guides for teaching Spanish as a second language in Indigenous communities, to be distributed only in 2000.[18] As a result, many children were not introduced to Spanish at a young age, which made learning it more difficult when they were older.[18][25] This was a concern for Indigenous parents who were hoping the IBE policy would finally make it possible for their children to learn Spanish.[18]
Another limitation voiced by the World Bank was that IBE was mostly implemented in rural areas, and a study from the World Bank found that in 2000 “18.8 percent of rural schools were bilingual [...] in the urban areas, only 10 out of 3,140 schools were bilingual”.[18]
In addition, another study by the World Bank which compared educational achievement in rural and urban schools revealed that rural schools were still behind, as seen in Table 2.[18]
Some Hispanic, Mestizo and Indigenous parents, as well as some teachers, were against the implementation of IBE as they did not think learning about indigenous culture in school was necessary or important for their child’s development. These parents wanted a reform which would focus solely on improving Spanish and Western teaching. These Indigenous parents thought that Indigenous knowledge should be taught at home or in the community, and learning Spanish and Western education was important for obtaining social mobility.[18][25]
References
- ↑ Canessa, Andrew (2008-12-01). "The Past is Not Another Country: Exploring Indigenous Histories in Bolivia". History and Anthropology. 19 (4): 353–369. doi:10.1080/02757200802611654. ISSN 0275-7206. Unknown parameter
|s2cid=ignored (help) - ↑ 2.0 2.1 Assies, Willem (2004-04-15). "Bolivia: A Gasified Democracy". European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies | Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe (76): 25. doi:10.18352/erlacs.9683. ISSN 1879-4750.
- ↑ Luykx, A., & Lopez, L. E. (2007). Schooling in Bolivia. Going to school in Latin America, 35-50. http://35.81.178.148:8080/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/38/Going%20to%20School%20in%20Latin%20America%20%28The%20Global%20School%20Room%29.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y#page=46
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Reimers, Fernando. "EDUCATION AND SOCIAL PROGRESS".
- ↑ Larson, Brooke. "Warisata". ReVista. Retrieved 2022-05-19.
- ↑ Iño Daza, Weimar Giovanni (2017-06-28). "Una mirada a las reformas educativas y la formación de la ciudadanía en Bolivia (Siglo XX y XXI)". Alteridad. 12 (2): 144. doi:10.17163/alt.v12n2.2017.01. ISSN 1390-8642.
- ↑ Rodríguez, Encarna; Hinojosa, Valentín Arispe (2015), Rodríguez, Encarna, ed., "The Ayllu-school (Bolivia 1931–1940)", Pedagogies and Curriculums to (Re)imagine Public Education: Transnational Tales of Hope and Resistance, Singapore: Springer, pp. 35–48, doi:10.1007/978-981-287-490-0_3, ISBN 978-981-287-490-0, retrieved 2022-05-19
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Regalsky, Pablo; Laurie, Nina (2007-05-01). "'The school, whose place is this'? The deep structures of the hidden curriculum in indigenous education in Bolivia". Comparative Education. 43 (2): 231–251. doi:10.1080/03050060701362482. ISSN 0305-0068. Unknown parameter
|s2cid=ignored (help) - ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5 9.6 Stier, Jonas (March 2003). "Internationalisation, Ethnic Diversity and the Acquisition of Intercultural Competencies". Intercultural Education. 14 (1): 77–91. doi:10.1080/1467598032000044674. ISSN 1467-5986. Unknown parameter
|s2cid=ignored (help) - ↑ 10.0 10.1 Contreras, Manuel E. (2003-01-01). "A comparative perspective of education reforms in Bolivia, 1950-2000". Chapter in Proclaiming Revolution: Bolivia in Comparative Perspective Pages 259-288 Publisher London/Cambridge MA: ILAS and David Rockefeller Center.
- ↑ Kohl, James V. (1978). "Peasant and Revolution in Bolivia, April 9, 1952-August 2, 1953". The Hispanic American Historical Review. 58 (2): 238–259. doi:10.2307/2513087. ISSN 0018-2168. JSTOR 2513087.
- ↑ Danbolt Drange, Live (February 2011). "Intercultural education in the multicultural and multilingual Bolivian context". Intercultural Education. 22 (1): 29–42. doi:10.1080/14675986.2011.549643. ISSN 1467-5986. Unknown parameter
|s2cid=ignored (help) - ↑ 13.0 13.1 S., Bhola, H. (1975). A Policy Analysis of Nonformal Education The Case of Bolivia. Distributed by ERIC Clearinghouse. OCLC 1061443777. Search this book on
- ↑ Contreras, Manuel E. (2003-01-01). "A comparative perspective of education reforms in Bolivia, 1950-2000". Chapter in Proclaiming Revolution: Bolivia in Comparative Perspective Pages 259-288 Publisher London/Cambridge MA: ILAS and David Rockefeller Center.
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 15.2 Contreras, Manuel E. (2003-01-01). "A comparative perspective of education reforms in Bolivia, 1950-2000". Chapter in Proclaiming Revolution: Bolivia in Comparative Perspective Pages 259-288 Publisher London/Cambridge MA: ILAS and David Rockefeller Center.
- ↑ Regalsky, Pablo; Laurie, Nina (May 2007). "'The school, whose place is this'? The deep structures of the hidden curriculum in indigenous education in Bolivia". Comparative Education. 43 (2): 231–251. doi:10.1080/03050060701362482. ISSN 0305-0068. Unknown parameter
|s2cid=ignored (help) - ↑ Quispe, Edilberto Jiménez. "We Want Public Education!". ReVista. Retrieved 2022-05-19.
- ↑ 18.00 18.01 18.02 18.03 18.04 18.05 18.06 18.07 18.08 18.09 18.10 18.11 18.12 18.13 18.14 18.15 18.16 18.17 Contreras, Manuel E., and Maria Luisa Talavera Simoni. "The Bolivian education reform 1992-2002: Case studies in large-scale education reform." (2003).http://web.worldbank.org/archive/website00238I/WEB/PDF/BOLIVIA_.PDF
- ↑ 19.0 19.1 19.2 19.3 19.4 19.5 19.6 19.7 Danbolt Drange, Live (February 2011). "Intercultural education in the multicultural and multilingual Bolivian context". Intercultural Education. 22 (1): 29–42. doi:10.1080/14675986.2011.549643. ISSN 1467-5986. Unknown parameter
|s2cid=ignored (help) - ↑ 20.0 20.1 "Bolivia / Ley de Reforma Educativa / 1994". www.filosofia.org. Retrieved 2022-05-19.
- ↑ 21.0 21.1 21.2 Taylor, Solange G. (June 2006). "Methodological Challenges in Complex Comparisons: Bilingual and Intercultural Education Research in Bolivia, Peru, and Chile". Research in Comparative and International Education. 1 (2): 187–197. doi:10.2304/rcie.2006.1.2.187. ISSN 1745-4999. Unknown parameter
|s2cid=ignored (help) - ↑ "Notice:Science and Scientific Researchers in Modern Society, by John P. Dickinson, UNESCO Press, 7 Place de Fontenoy, 75700 Paris, France: 254 pp., 90FFrs, 1984". Environmental Conservation. 12 (2): 194. 1985. doi:10.1017/s0376892900015885. ISSN 0376-8929. Unknown parameter
|s2cid=ignored (help) - ↑ Graham, Lorie (2010). "The Right to Education and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples". SSRN Electronic Journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.1701913. ISSN 1556-5068.
- ↑ 24.0 24.1 24.2 24.3 Lopes Cardozo, T. A. (2011). Future teachers and social change in Bolivia: Between decolonisation and demonstration. DelftEburon. https://educationanddevelopment.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/lopes-cardozo-future-teachers-and-social-change-2011.pdf
- ↑ 25.0 25.1 25.2 Regalsky, Pablo; Laurie, Nina (May 2007). "'The school, whose place is this'? The deep structures of the hidden curriculum in indigenous education in Bolivia". Comparative Education. 43 (2): 231–251. doi:10.1080/03050060701362482. ISSN 0305-0068. Unknown parameter
|s2cid=ignored (help)
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