EDUCATION-VENEZUELA: Drop-Outs and Gap Between School, Real Life

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Jose Zambrano

CARACAS, Apr 1 1999 (IPS) - One-third of youngsters who should be in school in Venezuela remain outside of the school system, where the alarm has been sounded because part of the problem is that educational programmes are, simply, boring and out of sync with “real life.”

The 1998 report of the UN children’s fund (UNICEF) points out that while 495 million children are enrolled in primary school in developing countries, 130 million – 21 percent of the total – end up dropping out.

Venezuela “lamentably contributes to that sad figure two million adolescents and young adults from 10 to 24 years of age who do not attend at all,” Leonardo Carvajal, who served for years as chairman of the National Council of Education, told IPS.

In this South American country of 23 million, the population is growing at an annual rate of two percent, while school enrollment has virtually held steady at 6.7 to 6.8 million students (of all grade levels) almost since the beginning of the decade.

The problem “has grown like a corncob shedding its kernels, mainly with the two cultural clashes, which occur in first grade of primary school and in seventh grade, when 12 to 14-year-olds face academic or economic failures,” said Carvajal.

“I’m leaving school because out there I can get things that bring me money,” 13-year-old Anibal remarked to IPS. Anibal is a 13-year-old seventh grade student in the ‘Pablo Vila’ public school, located on the border between the formal urban core and the slum belt on the southwest side of Caracas.

“When they say ‘things that bring me money,’ they are generally talking about becoming street vendors or assistants in some trade,” said math teacher Lucila Marquez. “But they could also be talking about joining a drug dealing network.”

The problem is mainly that “school doesn’t teach us things that we can use at once, and at home there are many needs,” commented Arlenys, a 14-year-old who is getting ready to leave school to work in a small feeding establishment run by her family.

“Many of us are tired of boring programmes and ‘geometries’ that we don’t need. And when you reach fifth grade (the end of secondary school), going to the university is like winning the lottery,” she added.

According to Carvajal, “kids are completely right in describing the teaching programmes as incredibly boring. Primary schools must leave aside the stupid aim of trying to teach everything, and secondary education should seriously begin to prepare kids for work.”

Marquez pointed out that “there’s a little of everything – some kids can’t even afford the bus fare (to get to school). Their families simply can’t. Some girls get pregnant and decide to drop out. And I just had a 16-year-old student who dropped out to work, because he got his girlfriend pregnant.”

Venezuela’s Ministry of Education has given the order that no pregnant students be kept out of school. “But they miss class due to the birth, and if they fail their exams, then they can be rejected as repeaters, or they just don’t want to continue,” said the teacher.

Education, and more specifically school attendance, are among the casualties of the war that Venezuela has lost in socioeconomic terms.

The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of this once oil-rich country has dropped steadily over the past 20 years, while the population, inflation and under- and unemployment have all continued to grow. An estimated 80 percent of the population presently lives below the poverty line.

The impact “has been very heavy in secondary education. While we are not in an unacceptable ranking in terms of primary education, with 89 percent enrollment, we present an enormous gap in secondary,” said Carvajal.

He pointed out that government studies indicated that secondary school attendance stood at 33 percent in the 1970s, compared to 39 percent in Chile, 22 in Mexico and 42 in South Korea.

This decade, that figure climbed to 87 percent in South Korea, 74 in Chile and 53 in Mexico, while Venezuela saw an insignificant increase, to 35 percent. “The collapse is total, even if we only compare ourselves with ourselves: only one-third of teenagers attend secondary school,” he added.

Analysts stress that any in-depth solution must be based on the socioeconomic roots of the problem. But they add that several generations could pass before Venezuela achieves indicators of economic prosperity and quality in daily life.

Meanwhile, however, “there are things that can be done to curb drop-outs,” said Carvajal. “One example is the programme of classroom libraries, applied in the first six grades over the past five years: books more varied than just textbooks, which stimulate kids to read.”

In secondary education, Carvajal, as chairman of the National Council of Education, launched a programme “for students to see ‘the ham in the sandwich’ and to dedicate 40 percent of their time to internships in companies, in order to learn practical skills.

“That programe was successfully tested in high schools in Aragua, Lara and Carabobo – three industrial states in central Venezuela – and 60 companies that agreed to participate: the nine students who later decided to go for the most demanding universities made it in.”

In Carvajal’s view, the programme could work as “an interweaving of theory and practice, an anchor for schools, a service to the productive sector and a democratic factor: it makes sense to make it mandatory for all students in all high schools, even private institutions where the richest kids study.”

Another programme, developed in neighbourhoods on the southwest side of Caracas by private foundations, has focused on reinserting 350 school drop-outs into 21 schools, redesigning for that purpose curriculums, schedules and learning rates.

The phenomenon of school drop-outs, Carvajal summed up, is fed by three realities: socioeconomic, the pyschology of teenagers, and pedagogical. And “it is a problem of funding, because this country earmarks five percent or less of its GDP to education, half of what an industrialised nation” allocates.

It is also a question of how the funds are used, he added: higher education absorbs fully half of the sector’s budget in Venezuela.

Carvajal suggests that the assembly which is to draw up a new constitution this year should change that proportion, assigning two-thirds of the budget to primary and secondary schools instead.