LATIN AMERICA-EDUCATION: Globalisation Demands Regional Alliances

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Nov 20 1996 (IPS) - Integration is Latin America’s only alternative in the face of today’s globalisation of educational processes, according to participants in a regional conference on the transformation of higher education being held in Cuba.

While the proposals varied, a majority of the participants in the Havana forum, meeting until Friday under the auspices of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), coincided on the need to create networks for “breaking the isolation, socialising information, accelerating production of knowledge and balancing its transfer.”

“Many ideas emerge in Latin America for associations, networks and other forms of cooperation, but few prosper,” said Luis Aragon, with the Federal University of Para in Brazil.

The need to boost horizontal international cooperation in the region is one of the key issues on the agenda of the Latin American and Caribbean forum, which is preparatory to a 1998 world conference on education also organised by UNESCO.

Reforms of cooperation in tertiary education should concentrate on replacing the individualistic focus that has prevailed up to now with a more general outlook, in accordance with the needs of each society.

According to Aragon, today’s processes of internationalisation of universities mean the transmission of knowledge takes place in a global context, ideas are swiftly generated, experimented on and circulated at a global level, and the exchange of students, researchers and professors between universities in different countries is on the rise.

That leads to the production of “human resources that are better qualified for competing in the global market of knowledge, allowing professionals to compete globally for jobs, and not only at a regional or national level,” he added.

But it is vertical international cooperation that continues to be the most generalised in Latin America, in spite of widespread agreement on a need for change.

The impact on scientific development in each of the region’s countries depends on the capacity of each to absorb, adapt and implement the knowledge acquired by its professionals abroad.

The lower the capacity of absorption and the greater the differences between levels of development, the greater the brain drain, which “is not only a product of ideological persecution,” said Leonardo Calo, with the National University of La Plata in Argentina.

Calo underlined that there is no greater temptation for Latin American university graduates than an offer of better conditions in which to develop their knowledge.

But while the flow of professionals from Latin America is growing, it cannot be compared to cases like India, which has lost 540,000 experts and professionals to the United States, according to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalisation Service, or the former Soviet Union, from which 100,000 professionals have emigrated over the past five years.

“The intellectual production necessary to a region is very low in Latin America,” said Calo, who blamed the situation on a combination of the effects of dictatorial regimes and, starting in the 1980s, a low level of government spending on science and technology, “which attacks not only salaries, but also the very conditions in which the work is carried out.”

Any association of universities in the region faces the challenge of overcoming the distances involved and the problem of shortage of funding, he added.

Calo cited the “realistic” experience of the Montevideo Group Association of Universities, which joins educational institutions of the Southern Cone Common Market (MERCOSUR), and has involved 10,000 professors, graduates and students in a range of relatively low-cost activities over the past five years.

Aragon underscored that while international accords provide significant opportunities for developing cooperation between signatories, the strengthening of such cooperation must be bolstered by political support in each country.

Boosting scientific and technological production in Latin America requires “commitment from governments to pay more attention to that area,” to which a majority of the region’s countries allocate less than one percent of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

“It is almost suicidal to believe that a State can take part in the process of internationalisation without developing its educational, cultural, scientific and technological systems,” said Calo.

“The intelligent development of the system in all its phases” would also favour “a shrinking of the gap separating development and poverty,” he added.