By IPS Correspondents
LIMA, Nov 2 2001 (IPS)

When six computers were first installed in the Huacrapuquio high school in Peru’s Andes mountain region, the school’s 83 students touched the new machines timidly, not even daring to remove the plastic protective covering from the keyboards.

Their teacher, Manuel Suazo, said the keyboards were left covered “so they won’t get dirty.” He instructed the indigenous students, who had never typed before, to first practise on keyboards drawn on paper, “to soften up their fingers, because their hands are hardened from working in the fields.”

Semiliterate indigenous peasant farmers in Huacrapuquio and other farming towns will enter the cyber era and the world of globalisation through their children, thanks to the “Huascaran Plan”, a pilot project that is promoting the use of the Internet in Peru’s public high schools.

Indigenous populations speaking native languages like Quechua, who do not always have a strong command of Spanish, were chosen for the launch of the Huascaran Plan, the most ambitious programme aimed at modernising secondary education ever put into effect in this South American country of 25 million.

Indigenous adults in rural areas account for the bulk of Peru’s eight percent illiteracy rate, and schoolchildren in those areas show poor reading comprehension and math skills, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

The pilot plan, part of a distance education project incorporating the Internet and satellite television, began to be implemented Oct 15 in Huacrapuquio, a town located in Peru’s central Andean highlands 320 kms east of Lima, in a depressed rural district that has electricity but no telephones.

With fascination, the students in the Huacrapuquio high school gradually began to enter the world of the Internet, clumsily exploring the educational web sites made available by the Education Ministry through the Panamsat satellite.

Peru ranks towards the bottom in Latin America with regards to computer use, with just 13 machines for every 1,000 people, compared to 50 per 1,000 in Chile, 26 per 1,000 in Colombia and 21 per 1,000 in Brazil, according to World Bank figures.

The Huacrapuquio high school is one of 680 rural shools, serving a combined total of 287,000 students, that will form part of the first phase of the Huascaran Plan, to conclude in December 2002. Over the following four years, more than 400 rural schools are to be incorporated into the programme annually.

The Huascaran Plan will provide each school with three to six computers, a television set, and a VSAT antenna designed for bi- directional traffic, providing access to the Internet and e-mail, as well as television.

Schools located in areas falling outside of the country’s power grid will be equipped with solar panels for running the computers and television sets.

But “that is just the technical part of the programme,” said Alberto Patiño, who is heading the pilot plan, which is part of the Education Ministry’s distance education project.

“The distance education aspect of the programme will enable teachers and students to use computer technology to study the natural sciences, math and language, the subject areas in which performance is poorest in rural zones,” Patiño explained.

“Four hundred television programmes are also being produced, to be broadcast by satellite, as well as complementary printed material,” said the official, who stressed that the initiative “will not diminish, but rather strengthen, the role of teachers.”

Despite the ambitiousness of the plan, its scope will be more narrow than President Alejandro Toledo, who took office Jul 28, pledged in his election campaign.

According to the figures provided by the Education Ministry, by the end of Toledo’s term, the Huascaran Plan will have incorporated less than 20 percent of high school students in Peru, which has 48,000 public schools, just under half of which provide education beyond the elementary level.

A limited national budget and the Toledo administration’s failure to obtain as much external financial support as it was banking on for its plan of “massive and accelerated access to the Internet” forced the government to modify its original plan.

Toledo failed in his bid to obtain a donation of 100,000 computers from Bill Gates, as he had pledged in one of his campaign speeches. Nor did he secure the subsidised telephone rates for public schools that he asked of Telefonica, the Spanish multinational that runs telephone companies in many countries in Latin America.

The agreement between Peru and Telefonica, which was to be signed Oct 11, fell through when the company refused to provide subsidised telephone rates, like the ones it plans to provide schools in Chile.

Deputy Minister of Education Juan Abugattas said “the government will only take the first steps, laying the foundations for a plan that will have to be continued by the next administrations, until the entire educational system has access to information technology.”

Abugattas also said authorities were studying an agreement through which the country’s 280,000 public school teachers would have access to low-cost personal computers on installment plans.

“Since teachers earn such low salaries, we believe they should not pay more than 20 dollars a month for three years, in order to have their own computers,” he added.

The Huascaran Plan “will entail a leap from destitution and semiliteracy to the sophisticated world of on-line communications, and the universal libraries of cyberspace,” said Edmundo Murrugara, a teacher and former parliamentarian who made no effort to hide his mixed feelings of scepticism and hope.

But the projected technological leap by Peru’s public education system is based on a shaky foundation that the government of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) attempted to strengthen by building schools, but without improving the quality of education or the salaries of teachers.

According to UNESCO statistics, Peru’s school performance rates are among the lowest in South America. A local expert on education, León Trahteberg, said Peru’s public school system was 30 years behind the rest of the region in urban areas, and 50 years behind in the countryside.

Peru also has the worst-paid teachers in the region, with average salaries of 171 dollars a month. In addition, around 50,000 teachers are unemployed.

Another indication of the crisis shaking Peru’s educational system is the drop in public investment, from 598 dollars a year per student in 1966 to just 259 dollars a year per student today.

The Huascaran Plan was launched with an initial budget of 35 million dollars, which is to cover costs this year and next. The government is hoping for the approval of a low-interest World Bank loan of 300 million dollars for the following four years.

The first stages of the pilot project will focus on rural and border areas, while schools in poor urban neighbourhoods will be given technical assistance for initiatives organised by parents’ committees willing to finance the computerisation of their children’s schools.

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