Pathways for Change
This is a preview article from the Fall 2010 issue of Americas Quarterly (release date: October 25, 2010), which will feature articles from top experts on the economics, politics, challenges, and advances in education in the Western Hemisphere. Subscribe to AQ. Or, read more about the Fall issue.
Education entrepreneurs can positively influence educational reform in a number of ways. But regulations, inertia and a culture that discourages entrepreneurship are choking off initiative and broader change.
The celebration of two centuries of independent republican life in Latin America is an appropriate time to assess past achievements, current challenges and future opportunities. Nowhere is that critical examination more timely and necessary than for the educational institutions that were created precisely to prepare Latin American citizens for self-rule. Schools and universities in Latin America were reinvented after independence to allow the new independent political order to flourish.
Unfortunately, politics, economics and excessive bureaucratic regulations have failed the original intentions of the region’s educational founders and stifled innovation.
It’s useful, as a start, to reexamine those original intentions to remind ourselves of what still needs to be done. Francisco de Miranda, Simón Bolívar, José de San Martín, Miguel Hidalgo, and José Artigas shared many of the ideas of eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers regarding the role of education. They were aware, for example, of the views of Jean-Jacques Rousseau regarding the role of education in supporting the legitimacy of a social contract of rights and liberties, and in maximizing human potential.
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