EDUCATION-PERU: Enrollment Has Expanded, but Quality Remains Low

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Abraham Lama

LIMA, Jan 9 2003 (IPS) - Peru’s Education Ministry and non-governmental organisations involved in pedagogy are discussing an educational reform project aimed at overcoming serious problems of quality and inequalities that have accompanied the expansion of enrollment.

Peru is one of 70 countries around the world in danger of not achieving the target of ”Education for All” by 2015, adopted at the World Education Forum in April 2000 in Dakar, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) warned in a report released Nov 13.

The local magazine ”Economy and Society”, published by the non-governmental Consortium on Economic and Social Research, completely dedicated its latest edition to the question of education, noting the marked inequality of access to education between rural and urban areas, and in terms of gender, in this impoverished South American country of 26 million.

It also pointed to significant differences in urban and rural drop-out rates, substantially lower quality of public education in comparison to private schools, and markedly different access to quality education by Spanish-speaking students and those who speak indigenous languages as their mother tongues.

According to Education Ministry sources, the debate today revolves around whether to put priority on designing new curricula and educational programmes and training teachers to implement them, or to emphasise Plan Huascaran, which is based on gradually bringing the Internet to all public schools.

Plan Huascaran was launched by President Alejandro Toledo during his 2001 election campaign, in which he promised to modernise education in Peru by ensuring that all of the country’s public schools were eventually connected to the information superhighway.

That same year, the caretaker government of Valentín Paniagua launched the National Evaluation 2001, to assess the reality of education in Peru.

The study, whose results were published in 2002, evaluated the performance of 40,000 fourth and sixth-grade primary school students and fourth-grade secondary school students in 1,226 public and private schools.

The outlook was alarming.

Only one out of four students who completed primary school showed a minimal level of comprehension of texts, and only one out of four could work basic math problems.

The results shot down the excessively optimistic claims regarding the expansion of public education coverage during the government of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000).

Fujimori administration officials had announced that education in Peru had made impressive advances, with a reduction in the illiteracy rate from 57 to 12 percent between 1940 and 2000, and the achievement of near-universal primary school enrollment and 80 percent secondary school enrollment.

Those statistics led the World Bank to give the country a high ranking in terms of primary school enrollment, authorities exulted.

But while ”they are accurate, the statistics have been used to hide the truth, because they do not focus on the poor quality of education,” Víctor Raúl González, a former adviser to the Education Ministry, told IPS.

”Peru was able to greatly expand enrollment, but it did so while neglecting the quality of public education, with the disastrous results revealed by the evaluation carried out in 2001,” he explained.

Leon Trahtemberg, the director of the León Pinelo private school, said ”We are churning out semi-literate people who know how to read, write, add and subtract, but are incapable of comprehending what they read or solving multiplication problems.”

”Education in Peru should be declared in a state of emergency, and it should be made the number one priority on the government agenda,” he argued. ”We must not try to come up with magical or electronic solutions, but must instead resolve the most basic aspects of education.”

The math and language curricula will be modified this year ”in order to modernise the teaching programmes and bring them up to the level of international requirements,” Education Minister Gerardo Ayzanoa announced on Dec 13.

”There will be a total and radical change of approach towards teaching math and language, which are the basic building blocks for learning other things,” he said.

Asked about Plan Huascaran, Trahtemberg said he agreed that the latest computer, Internet and e-mail technologies should be made available to the poorest students, but believed that the most urgent problem was to first overcome the shortcomings in basic education detected by the National Evaluation 2001 report.

He pointed out that of the country’s 50,000 public schools, which are attended by over six million students, only 400 had been equipped with computers – a total of 3,410 – by Plan Huascaran as of October.