The ship of education is foundering

The problems of Nicaragua’s education system persist year after year, government after government. Where is this ship taking on the most water? Will it suffice to plug up the holes or do we need to abandon it for another? And what can we do to change course?

Josefina Vijil

The problems, limitations and deficits of education in Nicaragua are not only getting no better, but are actually getting so much worse that it could be argued the ship of education is sinking. We urgently need a change of both course and navigators. Otherwise, we’ll never be able to resolve the country’s education problems because so far no attempt is even being made to deal with them.

Poor execution of funds

What’s going on in education that keeps threatening to sink the ship? Let’s start by looking at something that’s happening in the Ministry of Education (MINED), the country’s lead institution on education. The media recently reported that a team from the Nicaraguan Social Security Institute (INSS) had intervened the acquisition, information, finances and managerial offices of both MINED and the National Technological Institute (INATEC) to investigate the documents and computers of officials in charge of those offices in both educational institutions. First, it wasn’t made clear why INSS should be assuming a task that rightfully pertains to the Comptroller General’s Office. Next we learned—not from the government but from the independent media—that more than 100 MINED employees, including two deputy ministers and two area directors, “were resigned,” while in INATEC the first to go was its executive director. Neither institution has had any visible management since then.

Although there’s still no official explanation of what went on, we do know a few things. Going back to investigations by Melba Castillo, director of Nicaragua’s Center for Educational Research and Social Action (CIASES), we learned that international cooperation funds covered 18% of MINED’s 2009 budget and the rest was financed with resources from the public treasury. We also know that 90% of that year’s budget went to current expenses (mainly payment of teachers’ salaries) and 10% for investments. Furthermore, we know that while salaries were paid correctly and on time, the investment funds were very poorly handled: only 64% of the already paltry 10% was actually executed. The explanation MINED later gave for this under-execution was the contracting companies’ lack of capacity to finish their jobs.

In a responsible country this would have sounded alarms and motivated some serious decision-making: if the construction companies weren’t meeting their contracts, the reason would have been looked into and the contracting system would have been improved. But this didn’t happen. The following year the mission of the World Bank, which had provided funds to MINED, qualified its execution as “moderately unsatisfactory,” a euphemism to let the government know it wasn’t fulfilling the Bank’s requisites for good management of its funds. Despite that, international cooperation continued funneling resources to MINED; in 2013 the World Bank, using funds from the European Union, even approved a donation of US$53.9 million to be executed over a four-year period to improve the coverage and completion of basic education, providing opportunities for equitable access to quality education, particularly to the rural zones and vulnerable population groups by improving the educational infrastructure and facilities, bettering the educators’ effectiveness and strengthening the educational system’s administration.

The inadequate management of those funds has finally sounded alarm bells. The Treasury Ministry’s midyear execution report showed that by June only 18% of the 967 million córdobas (roughly US$37 million) for MINED investments financed with foreign aid this year had been executed. More alarming still was INATEC’s performance: according to Treasury, only 3.7% of the foreign funds it received had been executed.

A lack of commitment to quality education

Since the early nineties, international cooperation, national NGOs and the Nicaraguan citizenry through their taxes have invested an enormous amount in programs that have done precious little to improve the quality, equity and efficiency of education. At the very least, we have no evidence of the impact of these programs and especially of the sustainability of their results. Obviously we haven’t had all the resources we needed, but if those we did receive haven’t been used well it’s because of a lack of educational leadership committed to the quality of education, not only in this government but also in the previous ones.

The problem, then, isn’t just resources; it’s what they’re used for, how they’re invested and how well those investments are executed. What has just happened is the latest demonstration that those at the helm of the ship seem incapable of making good use of the resources available to them to improve education. Their inability enlarges the holes through which the ship is taking on water.

It is fair to state that if the external resources MINED has had over this nearly quarter-century period had been well used and invested in what they should have, we would be seeing an improvement not only in the educational infrastructure, but also in initial teacher preparation, their in-service training in the classrooms and the improvement of books and didactic materials, three aspects that are crucial to improving educational quality. I want to repeat that failure to take advantage of this opportunity hasn’t been a problem only of this government, but of all of them. There are shared responsibilities because nothing in education can be seen in less than medium-term periods. The difference with this government is that no other has had so many resources available to it or so seriously under-executed them.

The battle to improve access is not being won

Let’s now look at some other leaks in this ship. Since its return to office in 2007, the FSLN government has dedicated its main effort to ensuring access to education rather than to guaranteeing its quality. Its campaigns, policies and discourse have all been geared to that end. First they launched the “battle for first grade,” although they discontinued it after a year. That was followed by others: the “battle for sixth grade” and the “battle for ninth grade.” Despite this continual battling, reality has stubbornly imposed itself; none of the battles has been the success it should have been. This is a failure not only for the government but also for the country. Universalizing primary education is an essential challenge pending for our country since the 19th century. It should have been resolved over a century ago.

Here are some data provided by Melba Castillo, who has a doctorate in education. In the five years between 2009 and 2013, primary school enrollment has actually shrunk. We not only didn’t reach 100%, the objective of “the battle,” but it has dropped in absolute numbers despite the population growth: we went from 928,978 children enrolled to 879,562. It must be recognized that enrollment in rural primary education has increased slightly, albeit still not covering all school-age children, but it has fallen in urban sectors. According to the 2013 household survey conducted by Nicaragua’s International Foundation for Global Development (FIDEG), the net primary schooling rate (percentage of students between 6 and 12 years old who attend primary school) has remained virtually static with a downward inclination in that same period: 86.2% in 2009 and 86.1% in 2013. That means that roughly 14 of every 100 children between those ages, most of them sons and daughters of the poorest families, either don’t even start first grade or drop out before finishing the school year. Other sources corroborate those data. Even using the government’s indicator, the Adjusted Net Enrollment Rate (the percentage of students from 6 to 11 years old who attend any level of the educational system), the data indicate stagnation and even a tendency to drop.

Moreover, illiteracy in the population aged 10 and up has remained static at 16% since 2009, although, again, we recognize that it has indeed dropped in the countryside: from 26% in 2009 to 21.4% in 2013, according to the FIDEG household survey. The worrying part is that the rate for the country as a whole hasn’t moved for five years, among either men or women.

Nor is there movement in a figure critical to the country’s development: the population’s average years of schooling. For the past five years it has remained virtually static, with no important advance for the population as a whole: in 2009 average schooling was 5.9 years and as of last year it had climbed to only 6.1 years.

What about early childhood education?

The government, NGOs and businesses have made a number of efforts to expand the supply of early childhood education. From the public side, for example, there’s a program called Love for the Littlest. But the data tell us that so far very few families are taking advantage of these opportunities. There’s little demand for preschool education in the country, even though it should be the door through which all children enter the educational system. And I’m not only speaking of the third preschool level (for five-year-olds), but also the two previous levels (for three- and four-year-olds).

One of the reasons the efforts made to promote preschool education haven’t been taken advantage of more is that many families believe children only play in preschool and that this serves no real purpose. They very likely don’t know that play, in addition to being children’s main activity, is fundamental to the development of their brains. They probably have no idea of the importance for a human being’s development of having educational opportunities from the earliest possible age.

The neither-nors and
the demographic dividend

Guaranteeing access not only to education at all its levels but to quality education is particularly important for Nicaragua right now. We’ve been hearing for several years that our country is entering the stage of the demographic dividend. The demographic composition, known as the population pyramid, has shifted: the number of young working-age people has increased and the birth rate has dropped. This has many ramifications, among them that we should be providing educational opportunities followed by decent job opportunities for these youth. They need formal-sector jobs that get them into the social security system, as they will increasingly have parents dependent on them yet will not have a similarly sizable younger generation to care for them when they reach retirement age.

But what response are we seeing to this demographic change? A State of the Nation study presented at the beginning of this year focused on the population stratum that has been dubbed the ni-nis in Spanish (neither-nors), youths who neither study nor work. Others call them the sin-sins (sin = without): with no job or study opportunities. These young people are numerous in both the urban and rural sectors.

That study found that the number of ni-nis has dropped in the past five years in Central America, Nicaragua included. But the reason in the rest of the region is that more of them have started studying, or are both studying and working at the same time. In Nicaragua and Panama, in contrast, the drop in the figure is only because a segment of ni-nis has found work. The percentage of Nicaraguan youth who only study has fallen from 42% in 2001 to only 22% in 2010, while the number of those who only work has increased significantly. But lest the last part of that equation sound encouraging, the reality is that they’re working at jobs that are precarious from any point of view. They are very low-quality informal jobs with low pay, which do not allow them to either save or pay into social security and move the young people further and further away from the possibility of improving their lives through education.

The majority of ni-nis in Central America, again Nicaragua included, are young rural women. And the main reason they give for neither working nor studying, is that they’re either pregnant or are already mothers. Our educational system doesn’t know how to provide a response to a pregnant girl of 14 or 15 years old. There’s no adequate educational opportunity for her, so the only thing she can do is drop out or take night classes, which she effectively won’t be able to continue for very long.

Technical education vs.
an academic degree

The technical education we so urgently need in this stage of the demographic dividend isn’t functioning either. The lead institution, INATEC, mentioned above, is in chaos. It has been years since we’ve known who’s running it because there have been three successive administrative changes and each one has made changes to the curriculum. There’s also no public investment in technical education, which Nicaragua sorely needs, with less than 1% of the education budget assigned to it.

The universities shouldn’t be the only end point of the educational path. There has to be that option, but there should also be others. Why does a person who’s training to work in tourism have to have a bachelors’ degree? In the countries with the greatest tourist tradition, the tourism profession is a technical one. In Switzerland, for example, the students of the Hotel Trade School come away with a technical degree. Why in Nicaragua do they have to go to university and get an academic title?

We have an inherited social stereotype, probably dating all the way back to the days of Plato and Aristotle, that undervalues manual work and over-esteems intellectual work. That prejudice weighs so heavily among us that when we ask a mother why she wants her daughter to go to university, her answer is “because I want her to be somebody in life.”

Special accelerated
government programs

This government has implemented a couple of accelerated primary and secondary education programs in different departments of the country. While I haven’t seen any official document that makes explicit what teachers in those programs—called Sandino 1 and Sandino 2—tell me, they say they’re specifically targeted to the FSLN’s territorial structures, prioritizing party militants, sympathizers or at least future voters in the enrollment. Not everyone can compete to join those programs. Furthermore, I have very serious doubts that condensing a normal primary or secondary school curriculum into only two years can successfully build the fundamental knowledge of those two respective six-year schools. I already have enough doubts about the curricular conception of our regular educational system, where the curriculum is just a ton of contents the students have to memorize.

One of the government’s most recent accelerated programs to improve access is a rural primary school program aimed at students between 10 and 15 years old who work and can’t attend regular classes. Started last year, it offers them an accelerated primary school education on the weekends. Teachers I’ve spoken to who work in that program have confirmed that there’s a lot of enthusiasm among those who attend; they work hard at their studies. But while I don’t know the materials, I know that the curriculum is the same as in the regular primary system, which raises lots of methodological doubts for me. Despite all that, I do recognize that it’s a very interesting initiative because it’s responding to a need and is seemingly successful in attracting its target audience.

Our teachers need professional training

This brings us directly to the issue of quality education, one of the holes in our educational system that’s so enormous it threatens to sink the ship. The understanding of the concept of the right to education has been transformed everywhere in the world in recent years: from the mere right to access to the right to learning. From that perspective, we understand that we’re being guaranteed the right to education when, in addition to being able to attend an educational space, whether or not it is a traditional classroom, we can actually learn. And if we don’t, that right isn’t being guaranteed. For the right to learn to be guaranteed there has to be a curricular framework that permits the creation of learning situations; and there has to be a person, in this case the teacher, who is thinking about and strategically preparing situations the students can be put in so they will learn.

The teacher is supposedly a person prepared to create learning situations, to challenge students’ thinking, attitudes and information, to use adequate means and materials so they can build on their previous knowledge. But one of the ship’s serious holes is the way we prepare our teachers, most of whom are women. That hole is so huge we call it the vicious circle of educational quality: teachers who’ve been deficiently trained and thus reproduce those deficiencies in their students. When I speak of the issue of poor teacher training, I include their initial preparation, their in-service training (once the teacher is already in the classroom) and the deficiencies of the teaching career itself.

The efforts in Nicaragua to improve teacher training have been inconsistent not only in this government but in all previous ones. They have swayed with the fashion of the moment and with the interests and taste of those who come to government. This is the field that requires one of the country’s most important paradigmatic changes. Continuing to think about initial teacher training the way it is thought about today, making small curricular changes without fundamentally rethinking the model is one of the basic problems. Each new government not only changes priorities without ever addressing the fundamental problems, but also doesn’t evaluate other initiatives by independent pedagogues who have experiences and results from alternative training models. For example, we made available to the authorities a pilot project we finished in 2010, but the experience hasn’t been looked at. Moreover the governments don’t even evaluate their own or previous government’s initiatives. What happened to the much publicized “diploma course in values” begun last year to “improve educational quality”? The best that can be said about it is that it did no harm. Given that the government doesn’t provide such information, the results aren’t known, but it is said that teachers dropped out in droves and those who did finish are still waiting for their coveted diploma.

Our current teacher training
reproduces the vicious circle

Who chooses to be a teacher in today’s Nicaragua? To be sincere, mostly those who have no other option. Attending a teaching school then working as a teacher means having a job that offers no recognition and little freedom. As the Argentine pedagogue, psychologist and writer Emilia Ferreiro argues, we’ve turned Nicaragua’s educators into bureaucrats who have to adhere to lines laid down by others. And we already have more than enough bureaucrats in this country; what we need are professionally trained teachers who can decide, build, innovate, think and challenge. We need professional researchers, curious people, builders of learning situations, not simple obedient followers of guidelines. Professionalism is an indispensable condition to achieving quality in education.

But we don’t have professionals. Those who enter the teaching career bring all the deficiencies inherited from their own schooling: problems of reading comprehension, of being able to coherently express their ideas either verbally or in writing, or of developing logical mathematical thinking and methodologies for critical thinking. Our teachers thus end up teaching reading without necessarily knowing how to read with comprehension themselves; they have to teach writing without necessarily having developed that ability themselves; they have to teach math without necessarily having the most minimal mathematic capacities; they have to work with students who in this information age are being increasingly bombarded with information but don’t know how to turn it into knowledge; they have to send the students to investigate topics without themselves having the slightest idea how one does that… While these deficiencies are suffered by all students who have gone through the public education system, teachers multiply them to the nth degree because they touch the life of at least 30 students a year and will exercise their profession for forty years. What other professionals can say that over the course of their life they have touched another 1,200 lives in such an important way, for better or for worse? That’s why teachers are the ones who exponentially reproduce our society’s educational deficiencies.

The teaching schools are no help

All this is even more serious today because the young men and women entering teaching school no longer even necessarily have a high school degree; increasingly they’ve only finished their third year of secondary school. And the teaching school now offers them a six-month course then sends them off to teach classes.

Because the teachers’ own formation is so poor, when they start giving classes in a school, they begin to fill the gaps in their own preparation with what they’re told by the institutional culture, that set of social representations that make up the teaching association. And as in any other professional association, they “say” how things are to be done, which is generally simply how they’ve always been done. So teachers who don’t have reading comprehension skills, but have to teach the students to read, do it the way they see other teachers doing it and the way those teachers say it has always been done, since chances are they don’t know much either so unquestioningly reproduce those traditional ways.

International cooperation, particularly the World Bank and the European Union, have recently allocated significant financial aid to a curricular reform of the teaching schools with the idea of improving teachers’ initial education. Several years have been spent designing the reform with these funds, but we still don’t know what it looks like. Some time ago, in one of the few events attended by officials of MINED’s Teacher Formation Division, we asked them to fill us in on what they were doing, but they said they couldn’t because they were in the process of validating the new curriculum. Our response, obviously, was that the validation process was precisely the best possible moment for those of who have worked on the issue and in teaching schools to offer our view. They didn’t respond.

The Millennium Development Goals

This is the educational situation as we come to the end of 2014. And what it means for 2015 has government authorities as well as all the international agencies that have collaborated with Nicaragua concerned: 2015 is the deadline for fulfillment of the Millennium Development Goals, the famous MDGs. Will Nicaragua have met the commitments it assumed? It seems unlikely, but we can be sure that we’ll soon be bombarded with propaganda to make us believe we did.

In 2000, the beginning of the new millennium, the 189 member countries of the United Nations pledged to fulfill eight basic objectives for development by 2015. In the educational sphere one of the objectives says the following: “Ensure that, by 2015, children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling.” Three indicators further clarified this objective. The first is the net primary school enrollment rate; the second is the finalization rate (the proportion of students who begin first grade and go all the way through the final grade of elementary school); and the third is the literacy rate of men and women between 15 and 24 years of age.

Nicaragua as well as other countries simplified the objective, reducing it to the guarantee that 100% of their boys and girls would be enrolled in primary school. In the absence of MINED data, which we don’t have access to, I’m going to borrow more recent data obtained by independent economist Adolfo Acevedo from two different sources to add to the data I’ve already shared above. While the percentages differ depending on the source and the method, both show a similar falling tendency. According to household surveys he analyzed, primary enrollment reached 87.6% in 2011, but then dropped to 85.2% in 2013. On the other hand, the Adjusted Net Schooling Rate (a formula UNESCO has used since 2005, which consists of the number of children and adolescents of the age officially established for studying in the class year they are enrolled in at any level of the educational system divided by the total population of that age) showed that enrollment had dropped from 93.5% in 2011 to 92% in 2013. This indicates to us that even having reduced the objectives and changed the measurement rate Nicaragua will not meet the objective of 100% of primary school age children enrolled in the school system by 2015.

Those excluded from the educational system

Even accepting the government’s own figure, 8% of the total number of primary school-age children are not attending school and have no other educational options. Who are the boys and girls being left out? The “hard core” of those excluded are the children we see every day in Managua’s traffic intersections, those who live in the most isolated area of the Caribbean Coast, those from the rural areas who work, girls affected by human trafficking… It’s my belief that they’ll never attend the model of school we have, be it during the weekdays or on weekends. Nicaragua’s model of school is several centuries old. It was Comenio, the father of didactics, who proposed structuring an educational situation like the one we have today. At that time his proposal was a huge revolution, but today it’s obsolete because who believes any longer, for example, that the factor determining which children study together should be the date they were born? We now see that many other things unite them even more. In many European countries students are now grouped by age cycles but they move through them faster or slower according to their own rhythms. This debate has to be held in Nicaragua and in other parts of the world because education is in a generalized crisis everywhere.

We need to think of another kind of school, other educational modalities. Nicaragua will never universalize access to education if we don’t think about the poorest, about the children who can’t spend even 15 minutes in a desk chair paying attention, listening and writing because they were raised selling in the street, a continuous activity that seems more important to them than the boring classes they get stuck into at school, totally contrary to the way their brain has been wired and to their roles of coexistence. Boys and girls who work have another way of seeing the world. Why is it they fail in school if they’re capable of doing even more complex tasks in their work than the ones they’re taught in school? It’s because they can’t find any meaning between what they do in the street and what they do in school.

Finishing primary school

The original language of the millennium education goal before it was simplified remains as an indicator: how many of those who start first grade stay with it until completing sixth grade. Here Nicaragua’s results are even less encouraging. According to UNESCO, the survival rate through sixth grade in Nicaragua in 2007 was 48%. In other words, 62 of every 100 children who enrolled in first grade in 2001 dropped out before finishing sixth grade in 2007. MINED says the survival percentage rose to 60% in 2010, but Acevedo questions that improvement, showing that the dropout rates hadn’t shrunk in the intervening years. But even accepting the 60% figure, it is very low compared to other Latin American and Caribbean countries, many of which have hit 80% and some 90% and even higher. With the exception of Guatemala and Nicaragua, no country in the region has values under 70%. Comparing Nicaragua’s survival rate with those of Honduras and Bolivia, countries as poor as ours, Acevedo finds that it’s 76.2% in Honduras and 86.2% in Bolivia. It’s clear we’re not going to meet this MDG indicator either.

We’re doing better in the third indicator, the one related to illiteracy in the population between 15 and 24 years old. There we fell from 7.3% in 2009 to 4.9% in 2013. We aren’t going to reach total eradication of illiteracy in those ages by next year either, but we have improved and are closer to the goalpost.

What about the private schools?

At this point, it must be admitted that the private schools suffer many of the problems we have in public education. The still-current model of “Keep quiet, stay in your chair and copy down what I say!” also prevails in most of those schools. Many of their teachers come from the same teaching schools and bring the same problems as those who work in public education. They obviously work in better conditions and receive better salaries, but there’s no reason to think we’ll find huge differences between what happens in the public schools and in the private ones. While many of the private schools are Catholic, there’s also a sprinkling of relatively prestigious foreign-funded schools, particularly in Managua, for children of people of different nationalities and native languages who are working here as well as of Nicaraguans who can afford the steep tuition.

The virtually inevitable difference in the private schools is what is called cultural capital, which is what the family contributes to the children. Many of the students who like to read and do so well are from homes where they learned the importance of reading from their parents. These students tend to benefit more from their family’s contribution to their extra knowledge than from what the school teaches them.

Why limited education has
worked for our governments

The educational system I’ve described here has worked well for previous government models, which promoted foreign investment in Nicaragua based on the offer of a docile, low-wage work force willing to do repetitive, low-skill tasks, such as in the free-trade zones. And that kind of work force is best ensured by not encouraging them to get too much education.

Educational systems are also typically used as a tool to perpetuate the prevailing ideology, or in the case of less stable countries such as Nicaragua to consolidate the dominant ideas of the government in power. The current government is unarguably working with that same logic. But does that mean it wants the current disaster, wants the ship to sink? While it probably doesn’t, the existing educational model works well with its political model, which prefers subjects to full-fledged citizens who are agents of their own destiny. It’s harder to impose ideas on people who think critically, even though a critical citizenry is the only one that can guarantee the country’s development.

Why the ship is sinking

What we’re seeing today is a situation that has gotten out of hand. We’ve never seen such inconsistency as we’re seeing today. MINED is totally lacking in authority, leadership and teamwork; like other state institutions it’s subjected to orders that come from outside the ministry and don’t even take the education system’s rhythms into account.

Simply looking at access to education, without even getting into the issue of quality, we can see how many holes there are. We can see that the ship is going down at a crucial moment for the country’s development: the moment of the demographic dividend. We’re making virtually no effort to prepare the youth for the future that awaits them.

There are a lot of reasons we’ve gotten to this point. University of Indiana Professor Robert Arnove, who worked many years in Nicaragua, wrote a book he titled Education as Contested Terrain: Nicaragua, 1979-1993, in which he explains how education has been subjected to ideological and electoral battles for years, resulting in a lack of consistency and discontinuity in educational policies. To this he adds that education has never been a priority in our country, save in precious few moments—for me only during the 1980 National Literacy Crusade—and thus has never been assigned either the resources or the personnel needed to resolve the profound problems we’re still burdened with. Let’s look more closely at those problems in Nicaragua.

Education has never been a state policy. Education has been a policy of each government in turn, and sometimes only of a given minister, because a single government has on occasion changed ministers and thus the policy. Each new minister feels like the “savior” of education and tackles the problems as if nothing existed before and “everything starts with me.” A good example of this is the “battle for first grade,” a proposal of Education Minister Miguel de Castilla. It was a strategic proposal, because the majority of poor boys and girls drop out of school in first grade and the majority of the educational problems we have thereafter are created in that same grade. That is where the most serious problems affecting children’s self-esteem are formed only because most children don’t go to preschool; if they did, the problems would be formed there. De Castilla’s “battle” was fundamental, but unfortunately it was discontinued soon after its creator “was resigned” at the end of 2010. The same thing has happened with many other proposals; they don’t have continuity.

Education has no north. Education isn’t tied into the imaginary of the country we want to build, to a consensual project for the country. In fact, Nicaragua as a whole doesn’t even have a project. And without one, the north for education is provided by the minister in turn or is imposed by politicians or by internationally financed fads or programs. The regulatory framework we have today, the existing General Education Law, establishes seven years of schooling: one year of preschool and six of primary. Is that really what we aspire to as a country when even supermarkets won’t even hire people to mop the floor unless they have a high school diploma?

Why is Nicaragua investing so much in higher education [6% of the national budget by law] and so little on technical education? We have no north, no direction, no strategic objective…

In these times, when so much of our population is emigrating, either by necessity or by choice, accreditation is critical because it would permit our migrants to accredit their studies in other countries. Who decided to dedicate a good part of the budget to an educational accreditation council, then put in people to run it whose own credentials we don’t know and who have done absolutely nothing?

We don’t learn from our mistakes. These continual breaks or discontinuities, with no looking back, mean that we don’t examine previous processes, learn their errors, correct them and move forward. Nothing functions if every so often you have to start from scratch. We don’t want our educational system to be like Cuba’s, whose many problems have to do with lack of flexibility, critical thinking and freedom of thought, but Cuba gets the best results of any Latin American country in all internationally standardized tests. There are many reasons, but the variable that stands out most is Cuba’s continuity of educational policies. How are we going to learn whether or not the “battle for first grade” in Nicaragua would work or not if we discontinue it after only a year? How can we ever learn which methodology works best? The only way to make improvements is if there’s enough continuity in the policies to be able to study them. Education is a set of complex cognitive, attitudinal and procedural processes that take a long time to achieve results and can only do so with long-term policies. I’m not proposing immobility; but we need changes that grow out of ongoing research, social auditing and monitoring. How will we obtain that if there’s no continuity? We can’t build anything solid if it’s erected on a flimsy foundation.

Nicaragua’s exercise of education is “imposed violence.” Our education isn’t centered on learning or skills development but on fulfilling a curriculum, a program, which is not only impossible but unnecessary. With such a standardized and straightjacketed curriculum, what is being exercised is what French sociologist, anthropologist, philosopher and renowned public intellectual defined as “symbolic violence.” Someone decided what needed to be learned and that’s what is imposed. End of discussion. There’s immense symbolic violence in Nicaraguan education through a curriculum that allows no flexibility and is controlled even more now through the Evaluation, Programming and Educational Training Workshops, a monthly meeting of all teachers from a zone to program what they’re going to do the following month. These workshops are a distracting element, because a school is about opportunities to develop to the maximum the potentialities we’re born with to achieve personal and professional plenitude. If the school forgets that, it has forgotten its fundamental mission; it has been distracted from it. And our schools are definitely distracted from their fundamental goals, as Fe y Alegría’s founder, Father José MaríaVélaz, would say.

Governments think education belongs to them and not to society. Each new government that takes office considers itself the owner of education so doesn’t let others participate in planning and decision-making; it doesn’t consult others. We’re atomized, moving in opposing directions, dispersing resources and efforts. Many institutions have shared their concern with me about the impossibility of sitting down and discussing anything with MINED. People with links to MINED authorities have even told them the government “has decided to do things alone.” But it can’t do them alone. Moreover it has no right to do so because we all have something to offer. We have the right to be taken into account. That same tendency existed in previous governments; it’s simply worse with this one.

No research is done either by the State or by academia. The government isn’t the only one that doesn’t evaluate its results; academia doesn’t either. There’s no collective analysis to learn and move forward as a country. Furthermore, the education system is organized like a giant head in Managua, completely separate from what happens in the most important place: the classrooms all over the country. Everything is decided in a place that isn’t where the decisions get implemented, so the needs, particularities and potentialities of the territories and their schools aren’t taken into consideration. It’s an extremely inefficient system that’s unable to respond to the priorities and doesn’t have the most capable personnel. From the national level right down to the local level, there’s no educational leadership. In the local places there are no teams of people who have the know-how to improve education even if they had the power to decide.

Education is seen as a space for winning votes. The educational project needs to become one of national consensus, freed from being seen as a mass of votes a party or government hopes to get. No government is ever guilty of all the failures or responsible for all the successes because educational processes go beyond electoral processes and the term of any party in power.

How can we change this situation?

As I’ve already suggested, we have to change both the ship and those at the helm. And we need to choose wisely and well.

Find innovative leadership. We need people in MINED who are capable of pulling together a team with the capacity and vision to propose priorities, design strategies that are then turned into reality and find sustainable solutions to the problems we already know. We need leaders capable of reaching the poorest families and young people, two very complex sectors. We need a leadership that can think through and bring about all the changes decided on in each territory; a leadership that leads, but with the participation of all sectors, pulling together all possible talents in continual consultation in search of ongoing consensus. Figuring out how to reach the excluded poorest and modify a secondary school created for a society that no longer exists anywhere are gigantic challenges that require competent and responsible leadership.

Rethink how schooling is organized. Changing the ship would have to start with seriously considering the need to decentralize and attract the best professionals in each territory. I’m not proposing that municipal governments be given the responsibility for education, but rather that the Ministry of Education be decentralized so it wouldn’t be subject to the changes of both central and local governments and would have permanence over time.

Rethink the norms. Why do we need the same academic calendar in all areas of the country if it means always having to make educational bridges in the coffee zones so children who work picking coffee can study? Why couldn’t the school vacation period begin earlier and end later, to coincide with the coffee harvest? Why do we have to have school uniforms? And why the school hours we have now? Many organizational norms are as they are only because they always have been.

Eradicate the temptation of single thinking. We need to stop thinking of a single curriculum, an average student, an evaluation centered on comparison. Instead we need to work intelligently to establish a general curricular framework that allows for local curricula pertinent to each locality. Single thinking isn’t just something done only by the Right or only by the Left; it’s a temptation everyone suffers from. The single curriculum is not, as some allege, about making equity reality, at least not with the concept of equity we have today. Equality isn’t the same as equity. Bourdieu questioned that as long ago as the sixties, and we learned that more has to be given to those who have less. In an increasingly diverse society like the one we have today, why have the same textbooks for everyone? Why should everyone receive the same emphasis? Who do all teachers have to program the same thing for such diverse children and groups?

Establish a high-quality publicly funded national research and evaluation system. This would permit us to do the research needed to learn, discover new things and submit well-founded suggestions for improvements to make decentralization work. It would provide feedback to the national and local educational authorities so they would know what each one is doing; what’s working best, where and why; who could link up with whom; alert them to risks and inform the country about the best educational experiences. We also need to establish a system of quality statistics at the service of society, because the citizenry has the right to ask the educational system to be accountable, the right to know what’s going on in education.

Seriously deal with the enormous challenge of initial teacher training. This needs to involve all sectors. We already have experiences and know what needs to be done. But nothing will be achieved if we train teachers better, then don’t improve their standard of living. We have to invest in a professional career that will attract the best students, then encourage an educational situation in which those who are the best teachers don’t have to leave the classroom just to improve their salary. We want the best teachers in the classroom, not working as administrators because it pays better. We must understand once and for all that the vicious circle of educational quality will only be broken by quality teacher training. We must get over the habit of flattering teachers, calling them “apostles of teaching” and praising their sacrifice when we don’t treat them with dignity as education professionals. We have to start seeing them not as hair-shirt saints, but as professionals who deserve to be well paid.

Provide real educational options to the “hard core” poor. We need to assume that challenge knowing that the alternatives that will function are going to be costly and probably financially unsustainable. Educational options are urgently needed for youth, taking advantage of the years of the demographic transition that remain to us. The demographic dividend will be over in 2040, which gives us only 26 years to make it pay off. It’s not much time, so we need to push ourselves. If we don’t, this country will become a time bomb with an aging population that didn’t have quality jobs, couldn’t save anything, doesn’t have social security and won’t have kids that in this society are meant to substitute for a retirement pension. We need to revolutionize secondary and technical education, adjusting them to our times and our needs, not so young people can find a job with air conditioning, but so they’ll be able to create or be hired for jobs that improve their own life and that of their community.

Understand and embrace what I call the “challenge of the little step.” We’re always tempted to seek glamorous, sophisticated, extraordinary solutions, so we go around looking upward, dreaming of that solution. As a result we trip on the little step, the basic bit. We forget to focus on the fundamental aspects of educational quality: reading comprehension, coherent written and oral expression, logical thinking, critical thinking, abstract thinking, attitudes, scientific method, research methodology… A lot of research around the world has shown that small changes in things within our reach achieve huge changes. We know it, but resist going step by step, climbing each little stair one by one. There are teachers today who dedicate one hour each day encouraging the children in their classroom to read whatever turns them on, and it’s creating a fundamental change. If the education system doesn’t concern itself with these humble but important processes that are the soul of what happens in the classroom, the place where either everything or nothing occurs in education, we’ll never build a ship that can successfully navigate education’s difficult waters.

Almost all the above suggestions are about changing the ship, but it’s just as important to change those at the helm. Our educational authorities don’t listen, don’t want to hear anyone else’s criteria and don’t want to be accountable. We have the capacity in Nicaragua to take on the gigantic task of transforming our educational system right up to changing the ship. But we have to jettison that caudillista vision. We can’t look for “the” person who will do it. What we need are teams of people who can come up with and test responses. If single thinking has been harmful for the economy and for politics, it has been even more damaging to education.

The Zapatistas taught us this slogan: Never more without us! Any solution happens because we give our word, and we have a lot to say. Individuals, groups of teachers, communities and organizations… we all have something to say. If we don’t take on our responsibility to contribute and struggle for better education, Nicaragua will pay very dearly.

Josefina Vigil, who has a doctorate in pedagogy, has been a classroom teacher for years and is a specialist in teacher training.

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