Colombia exports its 'new school' blueprint

UNESCO Courier, June, 1999 by Asbel Lopez

"The New School movement is perhaps the most successful educational reform that I've seen in more than 30 years' experience in almost 20 countries," wrote Richard J. Kraft, of the University of Colorado, in a 1997 report for the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). "The boosting of teachers' skills has brought radical changes in the curriculum, in community development, in democratic behaviour and in improved schooling."

In 1989, the World Bank singled out the Escuela Nueva movement as one of the three primary school experiments in the world which had succeeded in making educational innovations, and recommended that "the lessons of this experience be widely disseminated among policy-makers in developing countries." Since then, the model has been successfully used in Guatemala, where it has been adopted in its entirety (see box page 16). Other countries, including Chile, Argentina and recently Nicaragua, have borrowed parts of it.

The Philippines is the first country outside Latin America to use the model to improve teaching at all levels in its multigrade rural schools, which have a poor reputation. The Multigrade Demonstration Schools Project (MGDSP) has set up 24 schools in 12 provinces. It all began with a visit by Filipino officials to "new schools" in Colombia in 1993. Persy So, a UNICEF staffer in Manila, recalls that the visitors were impressed by the pupils, who were self-reliant and responsible, and freely expressed their thoughts and opinions without fear of their elders.

The children in the Filipino countryside who have been part of the programme have gained self-confidence and show greater interest in their lessons. Some parents now prefer their children to attend these schools rather than traditional schools where there is one teacher for each age group. "It's like being in a private school," says 13-year-old Adonis Corasay, who likes the fact that the village school in Begageng, in Benguet province, north of Manila, now caters for fifth and sixth-graders, meaning that he will be able to complete his primary schooling there.

In Colombia, the New School movement has survived difficulties at local and national level. A study produced in 1998 by UNESCO's Regional Education Office for Latin America and the Caribbean, based in Santiago de Chile, showed that of 11 Latin American countries surveyed, Colombia was the only one where third-grade pupils in rural schools got better marks than city children in language and maths, in spite of having fewer materials and despite the problems of ill-educated parents, geographical distance and isolation.

Teacher training

Rural schools in Chile and Argentina, which were also surveyed and have adopted some of the ideas of the "new schools", did not show such good results as the Colombian ones. Schiefelbein thinks this is because they haven't systematically adopted the new programme. "Chile has only taken on board a few suggestions made on five pages of a manual, and Argentina is still trying out the programme in just a handful of schools," he says.