source : Buenos Aires Herald.

Last month, Unesco published a report on international education levels which is damning to Argentina. Out of 41 countries surveyed, Argentine students ranked 34th in maths, and 33rd in reading (Herald On Sunday, July 27). This did contrast with the news, on July 23, that Carlos di Fiore, aged 17, of a school in Pilar, had won the maths olympiad in Tokyo. However, the poor standard of public education has been reflected in university entrance failings, in La Plata, Mar del Plata and Córdoba. But when this domestic problem is projected internationally, as in the Unesco paper, the situation looks all the worse. The levels of education in Argentina have been sliding steadily for decades. During the last military dictatorship Argentina’s youth at secondary schools and university became suspect subversives merely for being young, but the problem did not start with the military or with the restoration of democracy. The kind of public education with which Argentina became a world leader and was way ahead of standards in South America belongs in an age quite early in the twentieth century, and was seen to decay as from the 1940s, and much faster in the 1950s. Starry-eyed nostalgics who argue that public education was the best are often speaking of a period before their birth. Virtual exclusion of education from the national budget, in all but token figures, a series of teacher strikes at elementary schools which got under way in 1997, and the absence of a policy of educational promotion under Peronist and Radical governments is at the root of the most recent crisis. In the last few weeks, the press reports on the decay of education standards has come fast and frequent. La Nación reported on July 16 that there was a serious decline in applicants for engineering courses. The changing need for technical courses has been a worldwide phenomenon in education fashions, although probably not as bad as the situation reflected in an interview with education minister Daniel Filmus, published on July 28, when he said that applications for engineering courses number 400 compared with nine thousand candidates for psychology. The economic crisis of the last six years could well be traced to educational failure, given that at least two generations have not been equipped to help build a future for themselves and the country. If we are going to get out of this crisis and regain economic health, perhaps the government should start with education.

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