EDUCATION-COLOMBIA: A Boost for Rural Schools

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Yadira Ferrer

BOGOTA, Jul 6 2001 (IPS) - Some 186,000 children in Colombia’s rural areas will be incorporated into the country’s education system by 2003 as part of the first phase of a government initiative that bears a price tag of 40 million dollars.

The main objective this Ministry of Education project is to ensure children ages five to 15 have access to schooling – whether pre-school, primary or secondary – in rural areas, where educational coverage is lacking.

The project was launched a year ago in the departments of Bolívar and Córdoba (north), Antioquia (northwest), Huila, Cundinamarca and Boyacá (central), Norte de Santander (northeast), Cauca (west) and Guaviare and Caquetá (east).

The initiative has proven successful at most sites where it has been implemented, an average of 10 municipalities in each department.

“It is a project financed by credit from the World Bank and projected to last 10 to 12 years, in three phases. The first runs from 2000 to 2003, and is to cover the entire country,” Carmen Pérez, the programme’s coordinator, told IPS.

Isolation and child labour are the main causes of school dropout and repetition of academic years in Colombia’s rural schools, which have traditionally lacked coverage in accordance with their needs.

In rural regions, the formal education system covers 30 percent of the school-age population, compared to 65 percent in urban areas. The dropout rate in the countryside reaches 10.9 percent, while it is just 2.5 percent in the cities.

The government initiative to expand access to education in the rural sector has four basic components, known as tele-secondary, post-primary, learning acceleration and new school, a four-pronged methodology cultivated in Colombia that has served as a model for other developing countries.

The endeavour utilises flexible models for smaller groups with personalised or context-specific materials to promote students’ academic progress.

“Any one of these methods represents a complete break from the model of the blackboard, children sitting in line with a teacher talking. Here, everyone participates through active and personalised strategies,” explained Pérez.

To make up for the shortages in secondary education, the level with the greatest deficiencies, the “post-primary” modality is used to cover the curriculum from sixth through ninth grade, as rural schools only provide primary education.

In the 600 post-primary education centres existing today in rural Colombia, the students organise themselves to work together in study groups, with the teacher serving as facilitator and tutor.

In the “tele-secondary” approach, one teacher provides instruction at all levels, but has the support of 15-minute educational videos, a method developed in Mexico.

A third modality, “accelerated learning,” applied in 162 Colombian schools, facilitates the reintegration of children who have repeated several grades and, because of their age, tend to be excluded from the education system.

This method, elaborated in Brazil, consists of reinforcing the students’ self-esteem and desire to learn. “It is an extremely efficient investment because in one year we can save a child from failure,” commented Pérez.

“Each of these systems allows children to miss school for a time, for example during harvest season, then return and reintegrate themselves into the study groups,” she pointed out.

The “new school”, a methodology applied in Colombia since 1977, will be strengthened in order to continue providing complete education at the primary level, and improve quality. This system has become national policy in Colombia, and many other countries have adopted the approach for their schools.

This system reflects a transformation of the traditional educational model, centred on the role of the educator, and is instead a participatory model focused on the student, explained Vicky Colbert, a promoter of this system and adviser from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).

The new school was inspired “by the most important pedagogical and cultural movement in Europe and the United States in the early 20th century, which broke with traditional, passive and authoritarian education, and proposed progressive pedagogical concepts,” Colbert told the journal ‘Coyuntura Social’ (Social Juncture).

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) highlighted “new school” in 1999 as a model that resolves educational problems in an economically sustainable and pedagogically competent way.

The education systems of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Philippines, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and Uganda, among others, have incorporated elements of the “new school”.

The teachers’ manuals for this methodology have been translated into English, Portuguese and Arabic. In countries that have large indigenous populations, learning guides with an inter-cultural and bilingual focus are used.

UNICEF, the World Bank and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) have ranked “new school” among the top three educational innovations of the century in Latin America that have proven successful internationally.

According to the theoretical foundations of the model, children do not learn more after being held back to repeat a grade, a hypothesis that educators say is borne out by statistics.

“New school represents a process of continuously building upon the foundations of what has been learned, the accumulation of knowledge,” said Colbert.