EDUCATION-ARGENTINA: Less and Less a Means of Social Ascent

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Dec 29 1999 (IPS) - Public education in Argentina has traditionally provided youngsters from poor families the opportunity to obtain a university degree. But over the past decade, it has become less and less a means of social ascent.

According to a recent study by the public National University of the northwestern province of Salta, “the Effects of Neo- Liberal Policies on Education”, there is a growing socioeconomic gap in access to education and school drop-out rates.

In Argentina, which experienced large-scale Italian, Spanish and other European immigration in the decades after 1880, was the world’s tenth-largest trading country at the beginning of the century, and the sixth in income per head.

But today, over one-third of the population has fallen below the poverty line, and a full 45 percent of children are born into poverty.

And while 27 percent of poor children repeat at least one year of grade school, that proportion is just 4.4 percent among the wealthiest sectors of society.

The study, coordinated by Juan Gottifredi, the rector of the National University of Salta and named Deputy Minister of Education in the administration of President Fernando De la Rúa, who took office Dec 10, found that 7.5 percent of poor children started school late, compared to four percent of those in a comfortable socioeconomic position.

And only 25 percent of teenagers from poor families graduate from high school, against 76 percent of middle- or upper-class teens. The school dropout rate is particularly high in poor areas of Buenos Aires.

Most minors who drop out of school do so due to the need to find a job. According to the latest figures, released earlier this month by Unicef, 252,000 youngsters under the age of 14 work in Argentina, the highest number this decade.

Juan Carlos Tedesco, in his book “The Role of Education in Latin America”, said “late entry to school and flunking is already a source of social inequality.”

Gottifredi said the study by the University of Salta indicated that the economic growth registered in the 1990s was not only accompanied by high levels of unemployment – 15 percent today, down from a peak of near 20 percent earlier this decade – but also widened the distance separating the two extremes of the social pyramid.

And education, instead of compensating for that inequality, has become yet another factor contributing to the phenomenon. In areas like the province of Buenos Aires, public schools are attended almost exclusively by children from low-income families.

The children of families at the middle and upper socioeconomic levels, who in the past also went to public schools, are now sent to private schools, depriving education of its role as a social leveller.

University Professor Mirta Goldberg, whose field is education sciences, told IPS that the curricula of public schools no longer provided the possibility of overcoming differences in origin as they did in the past. “The abyss is enormous,” she said.

Goldberg said the breakdown of values and morals and the decline of living standards was so great in some families that school was unable to compensate. “It is at times impossible for students from the neediest sectors to keep up work habits and study techniques.”

A Buenos Aires resident who opted for a private school education for her son told IPS that “I wanted to send my son to public school, just like my husband and I went to, but the reality is that those schools today revolve around the free lunches.”

The woman and her husband are both professionals who emerged from the public school system, which they attended from grade school through the university. But that trend, common up to now, especially among Argentina’s large – but shrinking – middle class, has been disappearing fast in the past decade, under former president Carlos Menem.

A preschool teacher commented that she set less ambitious goals for her public school students. For example, she teaches her five- year-old students the primary colours, which in private schools are taught to kids aged three and four.

“In the capital there are still schools where kids from different social classes mix together, but here [an outlying area of Buenos Aires] the polarisation is enormous, and we only see very, very poor kids, who are attracted to the public schools” by the free meals, she said.

The change is a big one in a country where many, including former president Menem and most of his cabinet, as well as many lawmakers, are the sons and daughters or grandchildren of poor immigrants with just a few years of schooling.

The new Health Minister, Dr. Héctor Lombardo, said his parents came from Italy, at the start of the century, without a penny to their name.

Another period during which the public school system played a particularly strong role as a means of social ascent was during the middle decades of this century, when the children of the workers who built up local industry in the import substitution era flocked to the university in large numbers.

But in the past decade, with the neo-liberal reforms implemented by Menem, which opened up the economy to competition from abroad and reduced the role of the State, education has suffered a severe crisis due to lack of funds, just when competition in the labour market has become especially cutthroat.

Over the past 10 years, higher levels of skills and greater specialisation have become necessary to land a job, while public schools are becoming less and less able to equip students with the essential tools.

“Just getting their kids to stay in school is a very big sacrifice for poor families,” said Goldberg, because today many families doubt “whether school will really guarantee their kids access to the labour market.”

In Gottifredi’s view, the gap in educational level according to socioeconomic status is getting wider and wider.

Goldberg agrees, adding that merely improving the educational system is not enough, and that what is needed is a profound change in public policies aimed at promoting a more integrationist model of development.