| A
Necessary but Still Distant Relationship between Education and Gender Perspective
in Latin America1
Malú
Valenzuela y Gómez Gallardo, Women's Popular Education Group
Mexico City
Introduction
This paper represents a first
attempt to reflect on ideas that will continue to be developed and studied
in light of the current trends resulting from the implementation of education
policies that have been promoted in Latin America during the last few decades,
with a look at the impact they have had, especially on girls and women.
Despite enormous advances
in the field of gender studies, which have permitted us to gain a certain
amount of objectivity about the problems women face in our countries, there
are still large gaps in our knowledge about the reality of education in
Latin America for children and adults, and about the effects of the policies
the governments have followed. By initiating more and better research that
focuses on privileging equality of opportunity while reassessing sexual
and gender differences, we should reach a point where we are in a better
position to develop alternatives for promoting tolerance, justice and democracy.
To speak of the relationship
between education and gender perspective in the Latin American context
implies, in the first place, that we take into consideration the poverty
of most of the countries of the region and the effect this has on girls
and women. It also implies analyzing the progress towards and the obstacles
to the fulfilment of the agreements and commitments on women that have
come out of the summit meetings, conferences and international forums--especially
the World Conference on Education for All and the Summit of the Americas--which
have been signed by the governments of Latin America.
Likewise, it implies analyzing
the situation in terms of the quality and content of lesson plans and study
programs, the bonds established between teachers and their students and
the message that is implicitly transmitted in terms of attitudes and values,
for the purpose of evaluating whether there has been change or reinforcement
of gender stereotypes that deny children the possibility of creating or
inventing new horizons and reference points that would permit them to build
a more equitable and just society.
Ultimately, this implies
formulating a series of viable proposals for reflection and action that
would make it possible to progress collectively towards converting education
into a real instrument for social change, both in the present for men and
women, and in the future for the new generations of youth.
This then, is the basis of
this paper, in which I present a general picture of what is happening with
basic education, including data from some of the countries of the region,
while looking more in depth at Mexico, about which we have access to more
information, since it is the country of our direct sphere of action.
Education within the Framework
of Social Processes and Its Impact on the Female Population
We start by asking the question:
To what extent have the education policies that have been applied in recent
years constituted a factor for improving living conditions in Latin American
countries, especially for the poorest sectors of the population, and specifically,
poor women?
In order to answer this question,
it is necessary to analyze the process of education and its links with
broader social processes.
Much has been written lately
about the significance of the end of the millennium in terms of what has
been achieved and challenges for the next century. In spite of dizzying
changes in the economic structure of our countries, the painful political
processes taking place in the name of democracy, the social transformations
towards providing greater access to health care and education and improvement
in the possibilities for a better life for large sectors of the population--including
the beginning of cultural planning that favours women's participation in
all areas of public life--there are still great inequalities that are having
a damaging effect on our hopes for democracy and social justice.
"As we reach
the end of the century, the greatest challenge for Latin America is the
elimination of poverty. Latin America has very high levels of poverty and
inequality. Forty-four percent of the population is living in poverty (ECLAC
1999) and at least 8 percent of people over fifteen years of age want to
work and cannot find employment (IDB 1998)."
"The level of poverty
is even greater for the 8 percent of Latin Americans who are indigenous.
For example, in Guatemala, 87 percent of indigenous households are living
below the poverty line, and 61 percent are in extreme poverty. In Mexico,
in the municipalities where the majority of the population is indigenous,
80 percent of the population is poor. In Peru, 79 percent of indigenous
people are living below the poverty line" (Reimers Fernando 1999).
Programs designed to combat
poverty have not been successful. Conversely, the priorities for Latin
American governments in recent decades have tended to privilege competitiveness,
efficiency and productivity for a globalized world. In this context, education,
which is supposed to be for all, is converted into a commercial good for
those countries that base their progress on information and are oriented
to a world market that requires increasingly sophisticated skills and people
with technological training, while further departing from the concept of
knowledge as something that is distributed for the collective good and
the improvement of living conditions for the majority.
Linked to the high indices
of poverty is the fact that, in Latin America, there are also enormous
inequalities.
"The highest levels of
inequality are found in Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama
and Paraguay. In Brazil, 10 percent of the population with the highest
income have incomes that are nearly 70 percent higher than those of the
10 percent with the lowest income. In Mexico, the figure is 40 percent"
(ibid.).
As a result of complex historical,
geopolitical and economic processes, the situation of the Latin American
countries is not homogeneous. However, it should be pointed out that in
the countries where policies that promote education were put in place over
the last fifty years (and, in some cases, for the last 100 years), the
relative income inequality is less pronounced. Such is the case with Argentina,
Costa Rica, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. The countries where a high proportion
of the population is indigenous, with the exception of Peru, are among
those with the greatest levels of inequality (ibid.)
The features of the neoliberal
economic model in Latin America, which operates in accordance with the
plans of the multilateral organizations, include privatization of state
companies, shrinking the size of the state, reorientation of economic processes
with a heavy external debt, and higher interest rates to the detriment
of middle-size companies and farmers, have left countries with empty bank
accounts, in spite of the recuperation that is supposed to have taken place
during the 1990s, following the crisis of the '80s. The vast majority of
people, particularly the poorest sectors, have never been offered the type
of educational opportunities that would permit them to gain better employment,
housing, recreation and health care. In other words, they have not had
access to the type of education that would make it possible for them to
acquire the skills and knowledge they need in order to access a decent
standard of living.
In response to this situation,
there is now considerable participation in Civil Society initiatives that
are becoming increasingly active and critical and which not only assume
a stance of opposition, but are beginning to provide very constructive
proposals. During the current social emergency, specific groups and sectors
are participating and making their demands known. These include indigenous
peoples, youth, the unemployed and women. Nevertheless, there is still
a long way to go before these emerging democratic forces succeed in reversing
a status quo that has kept 1 in 3 Latin Americans in conditions of marginality,
exclusion and poverty.
Educational opportunities
should serve to open the way for democracy to become a way of life in all
spheres of human activity. This is important, because those who see that
they have no opportunities in society tend to believe that they don't have
much to lose should the existing institutions collapse. A recent report
by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) showed a relationship between
the level of inequality in Latin American societies and the percentage
of the population that prefers democratic government. According to the
report:
"In countries
where the concentration of wealth is more equitable, such as Uruguay or
Costa Rica, a high proportion of the population believes that democracy
is preferable to any other form of government. In the more unequal countries,
there is a greater tendency to accept authoritarian governments and more
people believe that a democratic regime is no different from one that is
non-democratic..."(IDB 1998).
The severe repercussions
of the lack of opportunity that has resulted from the application of an
unjust and inequitable model have been well documented for Latin America.
The situation of women bears special attention, because women of the popular
sectors--especially rural and indigenous women--have had to drastically
redefine their means of existence in order to overcome the very harmful
effects of the economic policies that have been imposed. In 1990, fifty-one
percent of all Mexican women were members of families who were living in
poverty and 8.5 percent were living in extreme poverty (GIMTRAP 1994).
These figures illustrate the phenomenon referred to as the "feminization
of poverty" (Anderson, J. 1994). This situation has caused thousands of
women to enter into informal or formal labour. Women's participation in
the paid work force has grown and grew continuously over the last two decades.
In Mexico, the economically active population of women over twelve years
of age is currently calculated at 35 percent (De Oliveira, O. 1997).
The participation of women
in the waged production of goods and services, which, in turn, has permitted
them to acquire goods and services they would not otherwise be able to
access, has generally resulted in women being overworked, since they have
taken on new responsibilities without their being institutional or family
support for attending to domestic activities, especially childcare.
The double workday greatly
adds to women's workload, since responsibility for domestic reproduction
takes place in the private sphere where women are the ones responsible
for guaranteeing the well-being of the family. In this way, women of the
popular sectors have subsidized capital, since they have had to find a
low-cost way to resolve the need for reproduction in the home. Through
their work in the public and private spheres, women have been carrying
the weight of the crisis and of the economic policies that have been imposed.
Toward a Non-Discriminatory
Education
Given that there is a recognized
need for programs that privilege gender equity in the educational environment,
recommendations have been made during the recent international forums and
summit meetings that the participating countries take corrective measures
and seek alternatives that are designed to lead to non-discriminatory education.
This has been the case with the World Declaration on Education for All,
which was issued at Jomtien, Thailand in March 1990, the IV World Conference
on Women, which took place in Beijing in 1995 and the Fifth International
Conference on Adult Education, which was held in Hamburg in 1997. In all
of these meetings, it was recommended that governments take the following
measures:
As an urgent priority, governments
should guarantee access and improved quality of education for girls and
women, while removing all obstacles to their active participation.
All sexual stereotyping must be eliminated from education.
Governments should ensure
universal access for girls to primary and secondary education by 2015,
by adopting such measures as increased enrolment and scholarships for girls
and women.
Lesson plans and text books
that are free of stereotypes should be designed for all educational levels,
including teacher training.
All barriers that keep pregnant
adolescents and young mothers from attending school should be eliminated.
Facilities for child care should be provided.
Affirmative action measures
should be adopted in order to increase the number of women who participate
in decision-making in the area of education, especially at the level of
professor.
Illiteracy among women must
be eradicated.
In terms of education policy,
it is worthwhile to cite some of the recommendations that came out of the
Education for All Conference, because, in our opinion, they represent substantive
change towards the types of efforts we feel should be made in the area
of gender equity.
At the Conference, it
was established that:
1. Every person--be
they child, youth or adult--should be able to take advantage of educational
opportunities that satisfy his or her basic learning needs. These necessities
include the essential learning tools of literacy, oral expression, basic
mathematical functions and problem solving and the basic contents of learning--knowledge,
skills, values and attitudes-that human beings need in order to survive,
develop all of their capacities, live and work with dignity, participate
fully in development, improve the quality of their lives, make informed
decisions and continue to learn. The extent of these learning needs and
the means to fulfil them vary among countries and cultures and inevitably
change over time.
2. The satisfaction of
these needs strengthens people in their capacities and confers on them
the responsibility to respect and develop their common cultural, linguistic
and spiritual heritage, to promote education for others, to defend the
cause of social justice, to protect the environment and to be tolerant
of social, political and religious systems that differ from their own;
to uphold respect for humanist values and the commonly accepted human rights,
and to work for peace and international solidarity in an inter-dependent
world.
3. Another objective that
is no less essential is the transmission and enrichment of common cultural
values and morality. It is in these values that individuals and society
base their identity and their dignity.
4. Basic education is
more than a goal in itself; it is the cement of learning and the enrichment
of human development, over which countries can systematically build other
levels and types of education and training (Art. 1. World Declaration on
Education for All).
In the same vein, a little
over one year ago, during the Summit of the Americas meeting in Santiago,
Chile, the hemispheric heads of state signed a declaration that gives strategic
priority to education and which makes explicit the expectation that education
will be a key tool in combating poverty.
In the declaration
of the Summit, the following education strategies are proposed:
1. Local programs
for vulnerable populations that stress early education.
2. Systems for
evaluating academic progress.
3. Teacher training
programs.
4. Administrative
and institutional strengthening.
5. Education for
work.
6. Multicultural
curricula and policies on language.
7. Education in
values.
8. Use of information
and communication technologies.
9. Increase in
the availability of instructional technologies.
10. New technologies
should be used to connect schools and communities.
11. Hemispheric
cooperation for programs to provide high-quality training and preparation
for administrators, teachers and students.
Within the framework of these
policy recommendations, let us now take a look at the current education
situation, particularly how it affects women.
1
Many of the ideas presented in this paper are the result of the reflections
and work of the team of the project "Another way of being teachers, mothers
and fathers...” which was developed by the Women's Popular Education Group.
Some of these ideas are still in their early stages and should be analyzed
in the context in which they are presented.
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