Latin America must combat the low quality and inequity of its educational system and increase investment in science to reach levels of productivity that allow the region’s wealth to be “distributed,” the OEI Secretary General, Mariano Jabonero, said on Friday.
«Education is a treasure that is sometimes seen as a field of conflicts, mistreatment, union strikes, all this requires effort, requires investment, but if education is expensive, choose poverty to see what will be more expensive,” he said in an interview with EFE.
Jabonero, re-elected for another four-year period during the XIV Ordinary Meeting of the General Assembly of the Organization of Ibero-American States for Education, Science and Culture (OEI) held in Santo Domingo, pointed out that “there is a lot of work to do” for this institution throughout Latin America.
“We continue with ineffective education systems, with low quality, low inclusion, which do not serve everyone equally, and it is not enough to send all boys and girls to school because the quality of education must be improved,” he said.
He was of the opinion that “educational inclusion must reach everyone equally, without differences based on social origin, race, place of residence (…) The region must abandon a system that discriminates a lot” and recalled that the pandemic revealed that the best school access those with higher income levels had it.
From the OEI Jabonero will promote the creation of a hybrid educational system, mainly aimed at improving early childhood care, through what he called the “digital transition”, with the purpose of opening a “big window” for multiple opportunities of knowledge.
“Children of 12, 13, 15 years old do not leave school, they are expelled by the school due to factors such as discrimination, violence, which pushes them to go to the streets and become nini,” he said.
GREATER INVESTMENT IN SCIENCE
He stressed that covid-19 showed that science is the “best remedy” to get out of the crisis, for which he urged countries to increase investment in this regard.
In this sense, he specified that Brazil is the nation in the region that allocates the most resources to science, with 1% of its gross domestic product (GDP), and the other countries do so with between 0.5 and 0, 1 %.
“South Korea, Israel and Germany invest between 4 and 5% of their GDP in science, while the average among the other developed countries is 2.5%, so the region must more than double the investment in this chapter,” he stressed.
CULTURE and HUMAN RIGHTS
Jabonero highlighted the “rich” cultural diversity of Latin America and assured that the sector is “very important” for the economy, since it contributes around 4% of the region’s GDP.
«At the OEI we work to guarantee respect for intellectual property, copyright. Culture lost almost 1.5 million jobs during the pandemic,” he said.
She also spoke about the human rights situation in Latin America, particularly the attacks suffered by women.
“Today marks the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and it is common every day for women to be murdered for machismo in the region, in addition to being discriminated against based on their sex, race, geographical issues… it is a phenomenon that we all know,” he lamented.
Jabonero said that the OEI has launched a human rights and democracy program this Friday.
“The region registers high levels of violence, it is unfortunate that, when the indices of cities and geographical areas are disseminated, there are always places in Latin America that lead this undesirable ranking, linked to education, to poverty,” he said.
IMPROVE PRODUCTIVITY
The diplomat assured that since 1960 Latin America has not managed to improve its productivity and it must be achieved because, “if there is no productivity, there is no wealth and there is nothing to distribute.”
At this point, he insisted on the deficiency in the quality of education in the region and called attention to the “particular case” that by 2030 it is expected that there will be 45 million university students.
«The quality of these professionals who will be the leaders of the region is very important, to provide more knowledge, more information, more access to culture. They will be the spearhead to improve the productivity of Latin America », she valued.
