The counterrevolution in Nicaraguan education

Monthly Review, Feb, 1992 by Michael Friedman

Besides changes in what is being taught and how it is being taught, Nicaraguan educators are concerned about who is being taught, about the tendency to return to a past when the rural and urban poor couldn't afford any education for their children.

Darwin Juarez cited several factors leading to this conclusion. Services and resources such as textbooks, which were previously free, are now paid for while others such as a milk program for elementary students have been eliminated. The government's economic program has led to massive cutbacks in education and other services, falling real wages, and an unemployment rate of 50 percent. As a result, parents have been forced to take more than 200,000 elementary and high school students out of school.

Furthermore, the MED has implemented policies favoring privatization of public schools and universities. According to Juarez, this as become a general tendency throughout Latin America, based on President Ronald Reagan's "Santa Fe II, A Strategy for Latin America." In one recent instance last May, the MED announced its intention to privatize a public high school, the Mexico Experimental Institute (in part to try to break a teachers strike). "The mobilization of the education community - teachers, students, and parents - prevented this from happening, and the MED had to renounce its plan to privatize this school, which became a symbol of the official intention to privatize many schools and the resistance to this policy by the educational community."

But according to Juarez, the MED is also taking indirect measures to promote privatization. "One method the use," he explained, "is not hiring enough high school teachers, so there are 80 to 100 students in a classroom. Why? So teachers resign, so students become disillusioned and drop out. Or there is inadequate maintenance of installations or laboratories. The result is that private schools then appear to be the better choice for education because they have enough teachers, adequate physical installations, and equipment."

Another policy favoring privatization has been the government's budget cuts in higher education. This has left 15,000 high school students without access to college this year and perhaps 25,000 next year. The High Council of Private Enterprise (COSEP) has pointed to those students as a reason for establishing a private university. That in itself wouldn't be a problem, said Juarez. "What is a problem are the cuts in spending on public universities, and COSEP's professed intention of returning to the days of the elite university: you go to college if you can pay for it."

Government policy has worsened working conditions for the country's approximately 28,000 teachers. According to Mario Quintana, "teachers' salaries don't even cover the minimum basic necessities. There are teachers who have to work double or even triple time, or take other jobs to make ends meet. Over 80 percent of the teachers are women, many single mothers, and from this point of view wages are a first-order problem." Teachers earn about 275 cordobas ($55) a month, while prices are comparable to those in the United States. A working-class household of seven spends about 200 cordobas a week on basic necessities.