Abstract
April 2018. I was at Jorge Newbery Airport in Buenos Aires waiting for a domestic flight to my home town, Esquel, when a former secondary school student of mine said hello and sat next to me. When she asked what I was reading, I showed her my copy of Education in Mexico, Central America and the Latin Caribbean and added ‘If you want something political, read this book; if you want something depressing, read this book, too’.
Freire (1993) argued that education is a political act in itself as governments, the establishment and the dominant classes in general dictate what education is and who it is for, together with determining the hows, wheres, and whens – but teachers and learners can always resist and create a new social order from their role as political subjects. Reimers (2000) reminds us that education in Latin America has served to reproduce the social order or, to a lesser extent, transform that order with the aim of bringing about social justice. Whether those in power are the dominant classes or represent what Freire would call the oppressed, education is political for it serves to spread and cement ideologies, and it carries a cosmovision of education as a privilege or as a basic and universal right.
According to the editors of this book, its underlying theme is ‘to provide material to help us understand the very complex national and international social, cultural, and economic relationships that have led to the adoption of the prevailing systems of social apprenticeship’ (p. 1). However, the book does more than that, as it exposes how governments have used education and educational systems as part of their political apparatus to reproduce or challenge social order in parts of the Americas. With such aims in mind, the volume is set out in three parts, containing altogether 16 chapters. The parts purport to discuss education in Mexico, Central America (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua) and Panama, and the Latin Caribbean (Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti) respectively. However, readers should be warned: education is approached from a macro perspective, i.e. education as policy or education as politics, rather than education as bottom-up processes or experiences at grassroots level. Each chapter is constructed as a review based on document analysis and secondary data: mainly statistics from national and international organisations, even when readers are asked to take them ‘with a pinch of salt’ given their dubious accuracy.
Part 1 on Mexico epitomises political moves, tensions around power, corruption, alliances and confrontations between teachers, policy makers, and politicians. Although the chapters in this part of the book become repetitive in terms of what they offer readers, they all coincide in their view that there is an urgent need to embrace and implement educational reforms from an angle which is realistic, inclusive, and context-driven. In a similar vein, Part 2 on Central America and Panama adds more examples of how the expectations of achieving social mobility through education are crushed by issues relating to quality, coverage, delivery, and stability through educational reforms. Part 3, with the notable exception of Cuba to a larger extent, contributes with more examples of centralised top-down policies, lack of provision of basic and structural needs for education to produce sustainable effects, and the gigantic gap between educational laws and reforms and teacher education at both pre-service and in-service levels.
As a reader, the underlying feeling I was left with on engaging with the issues raised in this book was that there is little hope for the region. Failures of educational reforms on the ground are expected to be combatted with more reforms in the same scenario and, most likely, with the same political actors. The chapter contributors end their reviews with implications and suggestions, but these are closer to the realm of science fiction judging by the contexts portrayed in each country. For example, in the chapter on El Salvador the authors conclude that ‘recent models and special programmes should improve enrolment, retention, and quality in schools, but other outside factors such as economic opportunities and social violence have not permitted the desired results to materialise.’ (p. 164). In other words, the authors suggest that there should be changes in the economy and social practices first in order to plan educational reforms which are successful. Such changes may take decades before education can be addressed and implemented following quality standards.
Despite the harsh reality that the book projects, I enjoyed reading all the chapters as they provided me with insights and knowledge of regulations, alliances, reforms, sociohistorical processes, and political practices in contexts I was not so aware of, but close to my Argentinian lived experiences. Nevertheless, as a reader I found a few weaknesses. I would have liked to read a chapter, possibly written by the editors, that condensed the main features of education in the region under consideration and the future ahead. Having said that, the book’s introductory chapter discusses the background of the countries included in the collection and concluding remarks around four themes: the collection and use of educational statistics, the role of private education, the application of systems evaluation, and questions about the role and function of education. Given the bleak picture readers are left with, I would have liked to read some stories of success, probably the result of micro–experiences framed in ethnography, or action research. Perhaps the editors and chapter contributors, in their quest to provide readers with a general view of the state of education in each country, invisibilised teachers and learners among other social actors who make formal education, state or private, possible. Since Cuba seems to be the country where education has yielded more meaningful results than others, I would have liked to read more chapters on this country. I am not convinced that Mexico deserved six chapters merely because it is, as the editors explain, ‘the largest country in the region with the longest unbroken history of educational institutions with a long tradition of research and reform.’ (p. 2). In any case, such a long tradition of research is not really represented, and the chapter contributors have mostly discussed current reforms.
Education in Mexico, Central America and the Latin Caribbean should be of interest to researchers, policy makers, and educators – including those based outside the region on which the volume is focused, as it provides insights and a summary of educational policies and politics from a macro perspective.