"Latin America's challenge: learning how to compete" I think education is more important than the rule of the law.
Latin America's challenge: learning how to compete
miami.com
Halfway through the first decade of the 21st century, two studies from very different sources -- one from the CIA's long-term think tank, the other one from the socialist chairman of the European Parliament's committee on South American affairs, Rolf Linkohr -- shocked the few Latin Americans who had a chance to read them.
Both studies contradicted the prevailing view in Latin America that the region is enjoying a healthy recovery after three years of robust growth and that it has a promising future ahead of it.
And both arrived at the same conclusion: The region has become irrelevant in the world scene, and -- if it continues on its current path -- it will become even more irrelevant by the year 2020.
In the new global economy, where countries that produce sophisticated goods have much bigger incomes than those that sell raw materials, ''almost none of the Latin American countries will be able to invest their already meager resources in major research and development projects'' needed to produce higher value-added goods, the CIA's National Intelligence Council said. Only 1 percent of the world's investment in research and development currently goes to Latin America, as opposed to 27 percent that goes to Asia. And the region's growing number of populist regimes are unlikely to attract foreign investments in research and development, or to reform their outdated education systems to create high-skilled work forces that could better compete with China, India or Eastern Europe.
As a result, Latin America is likely to fall increasingly behind much of the rest of the developing world, the CIA's experts and the Linkohr report concluded.
Were the CIA and European Parliament futurologists right? Or were they so blinded by China's economic boom that they failed to see beyond the headlines of the day?
And were Latin America's leaders right in pursuing a growing distance from the U.S.-backed free-market recipes that many of them followed in the 1990s, or were they telling tall tales to their people when they claimed that all-out capitalism was bad for their countries?
Over two years ending in late 2005, I traveled to some of the world's countries that have been most successful in reducing poverty -- including China, Ireland, Spain, Poland, and the Czech Republic -- and to some of Latin America's most troubled countries -- including Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico -- to try to find answers to these questions. I interviewed most of their leaders, opposition politicians and average citizens on how their countries can best prosper and reduce poverty in the new global economy. And one of the issues I most looked into -- and where I found the most startling differences between Asia, Central Europe and Latin America -- was education, science and technology.
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Of all the people I met in Beijing, including senior government and Communist Party officials, the one who impressed me the most was Xue Shang Jie, a 10-year-old boy I met at the private English- and math-tutoring Boya School.
I was doing research on China's 2005 decision to teach English as an obligatory assignment for all children starting at third grade of elementary school. I had written a column saying that 250 million Chinese children were about to begin intensive English studies -- which meant that more Chinese than American children are studying English on any given day -- and I wanted to see it with my own eyes. So I visited the Boya School one evening at about 6:30 p.m., and was soon allowed to attend an English class. When I was introduced to the class, the children reacted with surprise, giggles and welcome nods. More than a dozen kids were sitting in the front rows while several men and women in their 60s and 70s -- obviously, their grandparents -- were sitting in the back, doing crosswords or reading magazines.
I soon noticed an exceptionally bright kid in the front row. He had huge reading glasses, a bright smile, and spoke fluent English. I later learned from his teacher that his name was Xue. He didn't need remedial English classes but was taking them because he wanted to improve his academic record and qualify for his country's English and math Olympics, I was told.
I had first thought that Xue was the son of diplomats, who had picked up his English abroad. But I couldn't have been more mistaken: His father was a mid-level army officer at the People's Liberation Army, and his mother an employee. They were middle class, and they had never lived outside China.
How's a typical day of yours? I asked Xue.
He told me -- in fluent English -- that he woke up at 7 am, got to school at 8 am, and studied until 3 p.m. or 4 p.m., depending on the day of the week. Then he did supervised homework in school until 6 p.m., when his father picked him up. From there, they would go twice a week to the Boya School to take English and math classes. He also had private tutoring on Saturdays and Sundays.
Could he watch TV when he got home on weekdays, I asked. If he was done playing the piano and finishing his homework by about 9 p.m., he was allowed to watch TV for half an hour, he said. And do you like studying that much? I asked. ''Yes,'' he replied, smiling again. ``It's very interesting. And if I study a lot, my father gives me a toy.''
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Amazingly, while China has begun teaching English in all public schools starting at third grade, four hours a week, no major Latin American country comes even close to that. Chile in 2005 introduced compulsory English classes at fifth grade for two hours a week. In Mexico, state-run schools in most states start teaching English in seventh grade for two hours a week. As strange as it sounds, Chinese kids -- who have a Communist government and a totally different alphabet -- are studying English much sooner, and much more intensively, than their Latin American counterparts, many of whom live close to the United States, share the same alphabet with their North American neighbors and grew up watching Hollywood movies.
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Why do children in Asia study more than Latin Americans, I asked in Beijing, Washington, Mexico City and Buenos Aires.
Many experts told me it's a cultural phenomenon, which has to do with Confucius' philosophy, which emphasizes education. Others said it has to do with China's capitalist revolution, which is driving parents to invest more in their children's education, because they know that -- with socialism's full employment policies on their way out -- it's the only way in which they will get a good job in a market dominated by private companies. And in China's case, it's also due to the country's controversial one-child policy, which often results in two parents and four grandparents investing in one single child's education.
But many Chinese and Latin American education officials pointed at another factor: Asian schools have a ''culture of evaluation,'' which is mostly absent in Latin America's state school systems.
''In Latin America, school systems focus on quantity, rather than quality,'' said Jeffrey Puryear, a Latin American education expert with the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
When I asked Argentina's education minister Daniel Filmus whether he agreed with that premise, he nodded. ``For the past 30 years, Argentina has not had a culture of excellence, nor a culture of effort, nor a culture of hard work. Our culture has rather been one of cutting corners and trying to pass the grade, rather than seeking excellence through effort, hard work and research. Our biggest challenge is how to introduce a culture of quality in education.''
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Nowhere is the absence of quality controls more evident than in Latin America's biggest state universities, including some of the region's best-known, such as Mexico's 269,000-student National Autonomous University (UNAM) and Argentina's 152,000-student University of Buenos Aires (UBA).
Both are scandalous examples of lack of accountability to their respective societies: They both refuse to be evaluated and certified by their respective countries' school accreditation institutions, claiming they are too prestigious to submit themselves to an evaluation alongside other schools in their own country.
''Virtually all universities in the country have submitted themselves to outside evaluation, except the UNAM,'' Mexico's education minister Reyes Tames told me. Filmus, Argentina's education minister, told me that the UBA has even sued the Education Ministry to block any attempt to evaluate it. ''Their argument is that their academic level is so high, that nobody can evaluate it, and that an outside evaluation would violate their [political] autonomy,'' Filmus said.
As a result, these and other major state-run universities are monuments to educational backwardness.
Despite receiving more money from their governments than most of their counterparts -- UNAM gets $1.5 billion a year, or more than 30 percent of the government's budget for all national universities -- their schools are overpopulated, their buildings are deteriorating, they lack proper equipment, and most of their classes are taught by recent graduates.
While 40 percent of British university professors have Ph.Ds, the percentage in Brazil is only 30 percent, in Argentina and Chile 12 percent, and in Mexico 3 percent. Worse, 40 percent of UBA's 11,003 professors work for free because the university system can't pay them.
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Latin America's biggest state-run universities are tuition-free, have virtually no entry exams for prospective students, no limits on the time it takes students to graduate, and no standardized graduation tests.
In Argentina, only two out of 10 university students ever graduate. Because state-run universities are tuition-free and the country has 1.5 million students in its university system, taxpayers are supporting hundreds of thousands of idle students. In Mexico, an estimated 1.8 million students are pursuing undergraduate degrees, but only about 30 percent ever graduate.
In China, meanwhile, there is a two-day-long nationwide entry test for all universities, taken by 6 million students annually. About 40 percent of those tested fail and are bumped off the university system. And the 60 percent who do get into the university system are ranked, with the best-scoring students going to the best-ranked universities. China's state-run universities charge students an estimated $550 in tuition fees a year, a fortune by Chinese standards. Only those who prove they can't pay are given scholarships.
Student fees help China -- where the government spends comparatively less than most Latin American countries on university education -- support first-class universities: According to a London Times ranking of the world's 200 best universities, Beijing University ranks 17th, while the best-ranked Latin American university, UNAM, ranks 195th.
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And while Asian and Eastern European universities are graduating large numbers of engineers, scientists and technicians, Latin American universities are producing record numbers of psychologists and sociologists. In Mexico, an oil-exporting country, UNAM produces 15 times more psychologists than oil engineers. A total of 620 psychologists graduate every year, compared with only 40 oil engineers. In Argentina, a country that relies heavily on its agricultural exports, UBA produces 1,300 psychologists -- and only 173 graduates in agricultural sciences -- each year.
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Education ministers and experts throughout Latin America told me that there is little they can do to change the system: Their countries' big state-run universities are constitutionally autonomous and run by old-guard leftist unions. Originally, political autonomy was designed to prevent governments from curbing academic freedoms. But over the years, it has become a shield for well-entrenched university teachers and workers unions that resist any changes.
''In Latin America's education systems, there's virtually no accountability,'' says Puryear, of the Inter-American Dialogue. ``You can have good or bad teachers, but it doesn't make any difference: You don't lose your job for bad performance, nor do you earn a raise for good performance.''
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Is Latin America doomed in the world race for competitiveness?
Not necessarily.
There are promising examples in the region: Brazil's Embraer aircraft factory is exporting 110-seat jets to Jet Blue, Air Canada, Saudi Arabian Airlines and several major carriers around the world. In Costa Rica, exports from Intel's microprocessors factory already represent 22 percent of the country's export income. Mexico's Corona beer and Cemex concrete empire are gaining markets worldwide. Chile and Argentina are exporting many varieties of excellent wines.
But these are exceptions to the rule. Overall, Latin America continues to be an exporter of raw materials. |
