The problem of rural education

(Author English version. By: Cristino Alberto Gómez Luciano)

Students in our rural communities, such as in other Latin American countries, receive the same primary and secondary education that the urban zone students receive: an education that allow them to know topics that they maybe couldn't learn from their grandparents, but doesn't offer what the students really need to know. I want to focus in the rurality because it correspond to the most forgotten and often the worst referred zones, and also because of the relation that exists between the rural zones and the agriculture.

It is a reality that most of the students of rural zones leave their studies in half of the way, sometimes because thay don't have the economic posibility to continue studying, and sometimes because they haven't found any convincent reason about what they do when dedicating half of their days to memorize abstract concepts, which they are hearing the only time.

Let's consider the case of a young person who have earned his seventh grade and canot continue the studies. What is he capable to do after eight years going to school? If that young have been very applied in classes, maybe thinks in the Egypt pyramids while constructing his own wood house, or remember the solar system every time that he walks under the moon, in his locality where there is not another light during the nights; but to establish those relations doesn't result neccesary for him, because what is really suitable for him is to understand that there are some priorities, and a long distance between his day-to-day and what he've learned in the school. That incoherence makes cuestionable the decision to send a son to the school instead of sending him to the farm, and the same problem causes the high migration levels to the cities, with the dream of "a better life" that ends in the frustration, in the border of the cities.

The history would be different if, instead of teaching the country people that the Amazonas River is the most mighty river in the world, it had been taught that their community's river is the closest to their world, which they must learn to use and take care of. The history would be also different if, instead of teaching them about the United States Crisis, it had been taught new options to get over the crisis that they are sufering because of the absence of some light in the way, or if instead of the algebraic inequalities the people had learned to solve the most inmediate problems that make them part of an inefficient system.

Hopefully a change will be made, in which first the farmers' children will be taught about how to improve their own condition, based in their available resources, and later, if it is left time, the exact extension of Amazonas River or the Mount Everest height.

August 4, 2007 4:40 AM