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THE SECONDARY EDUCATIONCURRICULUM

IN LATIN AMERICA:

NEW TENDENCIES AND CHANGESCecilia Braslavsky

FINAL REPORT OF THE SEMINAR ORGANIZED BY THEINTERNATIONAL BUREAU OF EDUCATION

AND HELD AT THEINTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR EDUCATIONAL PLANNING,

2–3 SEPTEMBER 1999, BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

INTERNATIONAL BUREAU OF EDUCATION

1

THE SECONDARY EDUCATIONCURRICULUM

IN LATIN AMERICA:

NEW TENDENCIES AND CHANGESCecilia Braslavsky

FINAL REPORT OF THE SEMINAR ORGANIZED BY THEINTERNATIONAL BUREAU OF EDUCATION

AND HELD AT THEINTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR EDUCATIONAL PLANNING,

2–3 SEPTEMBER 1999, BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

INTERNATIONAL BUREAU OF EDUCATION

2

Contents

Presentation, page 3

Introduction, page 4

I. The major tendencies of contemporary development and Latin America, page 6

II. The challenges of curriculum development for the education of young people in LatinAmerica, page 11

III. The new direction for secondary education: developing competencies and identities, page 14

IV. In search of a new type of curriculum for the coming decades, page 15

V. New proposals for modern secondary education curricula in Latin America, page 19

VI. Some consequences of adopting a new identity for the secondary education curriculum,page 24

VII. International co-operation for curriculum promotion in Latin America and the role of the IBE,page 29

Bibliography, page 36

Annex, page 38

List of participants, page 40

© 2000. International Bureau of Education, P.O. Box 199, 1211 Geneva 20, Switzerlandwww.ibe.unesco.org

3

This report was presented and discussed at aseminar on ‘The secondary education curricu-lum in Latin America: the views of specialists’,which took place at the Buenos Aires headquar-ters of UNESCO’s International Institute forEducational Planning (IIEP) on 2 and 3 Septem-ber 1999. It also incorporates information andcomments put forward at the seminar by partici-pants from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay andBrazil.

The purpose of the report is to initiate dia-logue and international co-operation with re-spect to new global trends and secondary educa-tion curriculum changes in Latin America in thedecade of the 1990s.

It is divided into seven chapters preceded byan introduction, which briefly surveys the ques-tion within the context of Latin American educa-tional reforms and the institutional characteris-tics of individual countries in the region.

The first chapter looks at some of the mainchanges occurring in the world and the newchallenges these represent for the education ofyoung people. Chapter II puts forward someconsiderations regarding the shape that is beinggiven to new curriculum material to meet these

Presentation

challenges in the context of Latin America.Chapter III focuses briefly on a few key featuresthat are giving a renewed identity to secondaryeducation, especially competencies and the de-velopment of personalities. Chapter IV givessuggestions regarding the characteristics of offi-cial curricular elements in the 1990s. Chapter Vlooks at the impact of curriculum changes atpresent and highlights the tensions apparent innew curriculum proposals, in relation to conti-nuity and innovation in disciplines and curricu-lum content, in the teaching of other languages,in the adoption of alternative forms of curricu-lum and in the connection with youth cultures.Chapter VI outlines some of the concerns whichare emerging in countries where the process ofcurriculum change is already well advanced,basically those related to the institutional com-ponent of change. Lastly, Chapter VII containsclarifications and explanations arising from thedialogue among specialists, together with somesuggestions for exchange and co-operation be-tween Latin American countries and teams andinstitutions in other parts of the world, espe-cially through UNESCO’s International Bureauof Education.

4

The decade of the 1990s in Latin America hasbeen particularly creative in terms of educa-tional reforms and innovations. Little by little,new needs, expressions and practices have be-gun appearing at all levels, together with newarrangements of education systems, though atdifferent rhythms and through different initia-tives.

This movement is beginning to extend to sec-ondary education, according to the stages ofeducation systems that were devised towards theend of the nineteenth century as non-compul-sory preparation for university or for entry to thelabour market (Mueller, Ringer & Simon,1992). For some decades now, these secondaryeducation stages have followed on from a periodof primary education lasting more than fiveyears, which has itself been undergoing a pro-cess of transformation and extension (Bras-lavsky, 1995).

Before the 1990s, considerable importancewas attached to the position of each level orcycle within the education system and to theboundary lines between them. At present, con-cern appears to be shifting to other issues. It isno longer a matter of trying to establish the iden-tity of each of the old levels of the education sys-tem, including secondary education, or to decidethe best point at which to divide one from theother. Instead, interest has shifted towards defin-ing an educational package that lasts twelveyears, organized so as to avoid sudden transi-tions between its various stages and aimed atproviding the whole population of the countrywith basic education.

As a result, there is an increasing tendency toassume that what is important is avoiding youngboys and girls having to face sudden transitions

Introduction

between institutional models created for differ-ent purposes and catering for different socialclasses and sectors. The basic package oftwelve-year general education for all may nowbe organized in cycles of different durations ac-cording to socio-economic conditions, tradi-tions and even the individual preferences of edu-cational communities.

There is also a tendency to assume that anydivision decided upon between stages mayprove better or worse depending on the context,and cannot be applied uniformly in all countriesor even throughout one country. The diversity ofstructures—which used to be considered a her-esy opposed to equity—is now being seen as analternative way of achieving more relevantforms of organization suited to different popula-tions, that is, as a possible tool of positive differ-entiation with which to build a higher form ofequity.

To achieve this, it has to be ensured that thetype of education promoted through curriculadoes not on account of these organizational dif-ferences further reinforce existing inequalitiesbetween students due to their origins.

In a situation where structural questions arelosing their relevance and in order to avoid refer-ring to any of the levels in the old structure of theeducation systems, another term has to be foundto discuss secondary education. The meaningadopted for the purposes of this report will be‘education for young people between the ages of12 and 18’.

For institutional reasons related to the roleplayed by the State in the organization and sup-ply of secondary education, Argentina was thefirst country in Latin America that tried to de-velop a policy of improving the quality of

5

secondary education—as far back as the mid-1980s. The implementation of this policy wasthen interrupted when responsibility for second-ary schools was transferred from the nation tothe provinces. Nevertheless, some of the prob-lems remained under discussion and werebrought up again in the provinces towards theend of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s,and on a national scale towards 1995.

In a second stage, other countries joined themovement in favour of the qualitative improve-ment of secondary education, particularly Chileand Uruguay.

At present, the majority of Latin Americancountries are starting to place the question of thetransformation of secondary education on theiragenda. Brazil, Peru and Bolivia, in particular,have begun to prepare programmes for improv-ing and expanding secondary education andhave attained different stages of development.

But beyond the stages and strategies adoptedby each country in its efforts to expand andtransform secondary education, they have allgiven prominence to the question of renewingthe curriculum. This issue has attracted increas-ing intervention and interaction at the variousinstitutional levels of government, i.e. national,provincial and even municipal.

In the major federated countries, curriculumdevelopment has been taking place simulta-neously on different levels, that is, on a nationallevel, at the level of individual provinces andstates, and in establishments embedded in theirlocal environments. In countries with a unifiedstructure, on the other hand, the provincial ordepartmental aspect does not take on the samedynamism, so that changes tend to arise from theconnection and interpenetration of national poli-cies and institutional innovations. In this newdynamic, it is not as clear as it was a few decadesago at what level the responsibility lies for thecontent of education, seen as the core ofthe school curriculum.

Historically speaking, it was assumed that re-sponsibility for defining the main content ofeducation lay with the State. The curriculum, asan arrangement of educational content, was tobe the heart of the national educational plan. Butthis assumption was questioned as a result of thepowerful expansion, decentralization and reallo-

cation of budgetary responsibilities that oc-curred in Latin American education systems. Insome countries at the present time, the main re-sponsibility for defining the curriculum restswith the State, while in others it lies with theprovinces. This difference is reflected in the le-gal status acquired by national curricula in eachcountry.

Nevertheless, some common tendencies havebeen emerging in the production of curricula be-yond the political level, which in formal termscarried the greatest responsibility.

The fact that common tendencies have ap-peared in the production of curricula in very dif-ferent countries may, of course, be interpreted tomean that either inside or outside the region thesame policies have been developed for subse-quent implementation in different situations.The truth is, however, that at present the searchfor solutions to the problems of secondary edu-cation in Latin America is to a large extent ashared undertaking, including a search for simi-lar references abroad, especially in Europeancountries.

The curriculum material used in Chile, forexample, was borrowed from Argentinianideas—which then borrowed some of themback again—while in Brazil there is a tendencyto select aspects from both experiences and tocombine them with home-grown ideas andinnovations. Bolivia cites definitions takenfrom Argentina, and so on. In all cases, refer-ences are made to Spanish bibliographies, andto a lesser extent the literature of NorthAmerica, France and other countries outsidethe region.

This report is proposed as a preliminaryanalysis of how curricula are produced for sec-ondary education in Latin America, based on therecognition of common tendencies in moderncurriculum development affecting the whole re-gion, and focusing primarily on national docu-ments and highlighting the production of SouthAmerican countries. The purpose of the report isto help enrich the dialogue and debate regardingthe situation and curriculum changes occurringin the world, with a view to strengthening thecapacity for shared learning and so as to en-hance the impact of the changes that are beingproposed and promoted.

6

The most prominent analysts of the trends fol-lowed by modern societies agree that the twenti-eth century was short and ended in 1989(Hobsbawm, 1996). After that date, events indifferent parts of the world have tended to beeven more interconnected than in previous peri-ods. The processes of internationalization andglobalization, which were launched at the verybeginning of the modern era in the fifteenth cen-tury, are now attaining degrees of intensity andextension which until recently were quite un-thinkable. In one way or another, economic, so-cial and cultural development trends are nowpermeating all continents and affecting allpeoples, thereby determining the spectrum ofpossible responses and alternatives available tosatisfy human needs and especially educationalones.

This tendency has gained so much groundthat many authors are wondering if we are notalready reaching the point where we need to re-flect on the desirability or even the actual emer-gence of a kind of worldwide education system(Adick, 1995), subject to a few national varia-tions and a greater diversity of institutional al-ternatives within individual countries.

A good starting point for discussing this hy-pothesis would be to take a closer look at whatthese economic, social and cultural develop-ment trends currently sweeping across theworld—including Latin America—really con-sist of, in order to identify within that contextwhat sort of challenges secondary education isfacing and what sort of responses are being pro-duced to meet these challenges. By comparingthe responses, it would then be possible to ob-serve collectively whether or not the idea is sus-tainable that—at least within the region—cer-

CHAPTER I

The major tendencies of contemporary developmentand Latin America

tain trends are emerging that could eventuallyproduce components of a transnational educa-tion system with a regional, or at least a sub-regional, dimension, or even a regional configu-ration of components forming part of a world-wide education system.

A HETEROGENEOUS, DWINDLING ANDINCREASINGLY CHANGING LABOURMARKET

There are at least five economic trends cur-rently occurring worldwide which are also evi-dent in Latin America. The first of these is thereduction in the employment opportunities notonly available but necessary to satisfy the basicrequirements of society. The significance ofthis is that young people nowadays emergingfrom the educational process may be increas-ingly delaying their entry into the labour mar-ket and experiencing periods of unemploymentor underemployment. The second is the growthin the greater number of jobs available in theservice sector compared with the agriculturaland industrial sectors. The third is the growthof informal compared with formal employ-ment. The fourth consists in the increasinglyrapid changes taking place in job profiles, par-ticularly with regard to specific skills, whilethe fifth is the changing scale on which theworking lives of individuals are conducted inpractice. One of the major factors in the latterprocess is the internationalization of the labourmarket. This means, among other aspects, thatcapital, companies and workers all have thepossibility of migrating from one country toanother in order to find a better ‘fit’ with the

7

requirements and availabilities of their interre-lated capacities and opportunities.

These economic processes give rise to differ-ent challenges for secondary education. The re-duced employment opportunities availableraises the question of postponing entry to thelabour market and extending compulsoryschooling so that complete secondary educationautomatically forms part of it. Expressed interms of the subject of this document, this leadsus to the conclusion that the secondary educa-tion curriculum will in fact become the officialcurriculum for a period of compulsory school-ing for young people, who will not be offeredmany alternatives except to remain within theeducation system. On the other hand, the rapidchange in occupational profiles is increasinglyreviving the traditional purpose of the educationsystem—to teach people to learn—making itinto a socio-economic and personal imperative,while the loss of job creation in the agriculturaland industrial sectors is forcing a reconsidera-tion of job training, which will have to be moregeared to services and white-collar activities,even within agro-industrial production. Thegrowth of the informal compared with the for-mal sector of the economy leads to the assump-tion that it is highly desirable for all youngpeople to learn do, in addition to becoming fa-miliar with key aspects of culture. Lastly, theglobalization and internationalization of theeconomy raise the need for education in differ-ent countries to achieve some shared standards,in order to avoid the population in disadvan-taged regions from remaining totally excludedfrom certain areas of production and develop-ment.

Taken together, the new economic trendsraise the urgent question of the identity of sec-ondary education. Some of its aspects are de-signed to train young people for some kind ofjob, through a system of specialized optionsproposed initially at the age of 12 or later at theage of 15. It would now be worth reconsideringthis need for secondary education to relate tothe economy. Is it possible or even desirable forsecondary education to consent to train for thelabour market when the latter appears to offerlittle room for all the young people streamingout of secondary schools? In the last decade, in-

creasing emphasis has been placed on the con-sideration that the real challenge for secondaryeducation should be not so much to train for theemployment market, but rather to train for em-ployment. It will probably be necessary to beeven bolder and suggest that education—takenas a whole—should train for multiple activities(Gorz, 1998), that is, for a productive occupa-tion, for cultural creativity, for a harmonioussocial life, for family life, etc., and for an alter-nation between periods when one or another ofthese types of activity will predominatethroughout a person’s life.

THE WORSENING OF SOCIALINEQUALITIES

One of the most complex features arising fromthe new trends in economic development, theconsequences of which are the most difficult topredict, is the aggravation occurring in existingsocial inequalities and the emergence of newtypes of inequality. According to a number ofauthors, the starting point in life should increas-ingly be seen in modern societies as the deter-mining factor in an individual’s subsequent ca-reer (Fitoussi & Rosanvallon, 1997; Altimir,1997; Minujín, 1999). They suggest that socialmobility is nil and that owing to the many oppor-tunities for young people to accumulate theireducational capital, the inequalities in later ca-reers would be greater than those already thereat the starting point. If so, the task of meeting thechallenges of living together, of economicgrowth and democracy would be extremelycomplex. Day-to-day violence would constantlyincrease, turning into a kind of permanent guer-rilla activity, though without any political goalin terms of reform or social revolution (Rifkin,1996).

While it is hard to imagine that this type ofsituation can be countered merely through edu-cational policies (Braslavsky, 1999), it wouldseem to be particularly important to deal withtwo questions.

The first concerns the problem of designingcurricula and educational processes that at leastattempt to offer equivalent educational opportu-nities to all young people, regardless of their

8

social origins, thereby constantly challengingthe assumption of an irreversible structural de-termination of educational careers—even in theknowledge that whatever may be achieved willnecessarily be limited. One way of arriving atthis outcome would be to ensure that all educa-tional paths offer a reasonable amount of gen-eral education, including basic humanistic andtechnological components, as well as context-related training.

The design of educational methods based onteaching experiences containing strong situ-ational and problem-solving components, al-though historically rooted in the developmentof school disciplines, has tended to be a waningalternative. According to some authors(Goodson, 1995; Dussel & Pineau, 1995), ef-forts to build a more context-related secondaryeducation did not succeed because their successwould have signified relaxing the criterion ofaccess and continuity in secondary education asa means of differentiating between élites andworkers. Recent scientific and technologicaladvances are believed to be transforming occu-pations little by little in such a way that manualwork is tending to disappear as a career option,its place being taken by automation.

In the circumstances, the combination of asolid general education with humanistic, scien-tific, technological and context-related compo-nents would constitute the only possible alter-native allowing all young people to have accessto the types of jobs that will endure and for theperformance of which they will need to knowboth how to think and how to do. That combina-tion would also enable the young people tolearn how to think better and do better. In fact,there would appear to be accumulating empiri-cal evidence in the world that the combinationof both types of learning improves the quality ofeach of them and opens the way to new solu-tions to problems with social, economic and po-litical systems where these do not exist (deMoura Castro, 1984; Araujo & Oliveira, 1994).

The second question would be the need togive more time to training qualities that encour-age young people to appreciate harmonious andpeaceful co-existence and to reject polarizedsocieties. Put in a different way, young peopleneed to be encouraged to understand that the

unequal, arbitrary distribution of opportunitiesof access to social benefits, especially educa-tion and work, can jeopardize the survival ofsociety as a whole.

BETTER RECOGNIZED DIVERSITY

Historically speaking, education systems wereconceived to ‘transfer the culture of adult gen-erations to younger generations’, even more soin the case of secondary education than in pri-mary education. This position was based on fiveassumptions that now appear open to doubt. Thefirst is that the younger generations do not havea culture of their own and therefore offer no re-sistance to the learning of adult cultural contentsand norms. The second is that adult culture ishomogeneous. The third is that youth culturesare also homogeneous. The fourth assumption isthat adult culture and, as part of that culture, theproduction and structure of knowledge arestable over time, while the fifth is that educationsystems and schools are the main depositories ofexpertise in terms of transmitting this informa-tion.

In recent years, however, there has been arecognition of Latin America’s cultural diver-sity and an acceptance of historically subordi-nated cultures, especially indigenous ones(Calderón & Dos Santos, 1995; Martín-Barbero, 1998). In this respect demands havebeen voiced in many countries for this diversityto be taken into account, including in thechanges being introduced in secondary educa-tion, with suggestions, for instance, that indig-enous languages could be taught as part of thesecondary education curriculum.

All over the world, and as part of this generalmovement in Latin America as well, there hasbeen a growing tendency for youth cultures toemerge and prosper through forms of produc-tion and consumption occurring in circuits out-side the schools (see, for example, Semán &Vila, 1999). According to some views and re-search, the failure of the secondary schoolmodel to adapt to the characteristics of the newsocial groups and sectors attending secondaryschool, added to the failure to take account ofthe existence of young people’s own require-

9

ments and demands, are significant factorswhen it comes to understanding the reasons fordropout and low learning levels among adoles-cents and young people (Finkielkraut, 1987;Obiols & di Segni de Obiols, 1994).

This means that if young people are to attend,stay and learn in secondary schools, they haveto find there opportunities for taking an activepart in a variety of practices that allow them tomake their schools into youthful living environ-ments. Furthermore, youth is not a homoge-neous conglomerate, but a collection of groupsof persons with varied interests, needs andknowledge, at times converging and at times di-verging with respect to adults and among them-selves (Braslavsky, 1987; Touraine, 1988). Buttheir culture is not the perfect alternative, norcan it be the only point of reference for second-ary education.

Secondary education emerged at a time whenknowledge was being structured into academicdisciplines, which were considered to be clearlyseparate from each other and likely to remainsignificantly constant over time. With the ap-pearance of a new scientific-technological-pro-ductive system (Lesourne, 1993), however, thedivisions between academic disciplines havebeen constantly effaced and redrawn, whilestrong internal links have appeared, only toprove short-lived. Some major disciplinesstructured in the second half of the twentiethcentury have remained excluded from second-ary education, while other more precarious dis-ciplines have kept their place. It needs to be un-derstood that, apart from concepts and data thatbecome outdated, the curriculum must containfertile procedures for lifelong learning, or atleast a combination of both structured in accor-dance with an organizing principle external toboth.

Lastly, the revolution in communications hasopened the way to new expert systems for trans-mitting and accessing information, as well as tocultural values and standards that are muchmore effective at fulfilling those functions thaneducation systems and secondary schools(Harasim et al., 1995; Palloff & Pratt, 1999). Itis therefore essential that schools should takefull account of the risks and opportunities thatthese new expert systems give rise to, especially

with the emergence of the concept of connectedintelligence (de Kerckhove, 1997). The com-munications revolution could also shed usefullight on the local impact of regional and world-wide tendencies.

ATTEMPTS AT EXTENDINGDEMOCRACY: BETTERREPRESENTATION AND MOREPROTAGONISM

In Latin America, broad social sectors are seek-ing alternatives in order to change politics, tak-ing this to mean all concepts and actions relatedto public affairs. This search is associated withthe crisis occurring in the forms of representa-tion and the legitimacy of politics in the region,with changing forms of economic integration,with growing social exclusion and with the re-structuring taking place in communications.What has emerged is the model of a ‘market so-ciety’, where everything is negotiable and indi-vidualistic strategies opposed to collective com-promises are energetically pursued (Lechner,1999).

This emergence of a ‘market society’ modelis related to a sense of disillusion. A few de-cades ago in Latin America, democracy was ex-clusively associated with institutional forms ofdemocratic liberalism or with the welfare stateand its paternalistic concern with redistribution.In that context, the challenges arising for theeducation of young people consisted of trainingvoters and the representatives and officials of aState governed by the rule of law. The way ofovercoming disillusion presently lies in extend-ing the concept of democracy or changing itinto another able to reactivate the willingness torebuild those collective compromises on the ba-sis of social practices. Little by little, in fact,expectations have been growing with regard tothe possible contributions that secondary edu-cation could make to democracy. The very con-cept of democracy took as its core the defenceand promotion of human rights, and hence theforms of living which entail a recognition and alearning of these new collective compromises.This changing concept of democracy is also as-sociated with the experience of physical

10

violence of the 1970s and 1980s, and with thewish to avoid any recurrence of that violence, aswell as with the experience of extreme socialinequality and its consequences in terms offamily disintegration and personal insecurity.

Based on this broader conceptual approach,which influenced many countries in the re-gion, new issues began to loom increasinglylarge on the agenda and to be seen as chal-lenges for secondary education. They includethe teaching of human rights from a concep-tual and existential point of view, the respectfor differences and the integration of youngpeople with special educational needs in regu-lar schools.

Young people themselves appear to be caughtup in a tension between that apparent disillusionwith politics on the one hand and, on the other,social, cultural and religious associative prota-

gonism, which has been attracting an increasingnumber and a greater variety of institutions andindividuals, and which detaches them from theaccusation of apathy by adults, for whom theonly legitimate forms of political participationare those that relate to the familiar context ofthe party system.

The likelihood that these new forms ofprotagonism will become institutionalized in anenvironment suited to the joint and shared pro-motion of a better quality of life also depends toa significant extent on the opportunity foryoung people during their education to acquirecapacities and values suited to life in common.This would require more time at school thanthat available in the old system of primary edu-cation, as well as contents and teaching con-cepts different from those of the traditional sec-ondary education system.

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After analysing the various aspects presented sofar regarding the tendencies towards change inLatin America and the world, it may be said thatsecondary education curricula will also have tobe reformed in response to the strong demandfor enrolling more young people in educationand for improving the quality as well as the effi-ciency of the education offered to meet theneeds of young people. What is needed is a com-bined approach to achieve greater flexibility andstructural modernization, as well as changes inthe contents and methodologies of teaching andlearning.

In some countries, particularly Chile and Ar-gentina, more than 70% of young people werealready attending secondary education in 1995(UNESCO, 1998). In other countries, the per-centage of young people currently admitted isgrowing very rapidly. In practically all coun-tries, this level of the education system is ex-panding much more rapidly than primary educa-tion. Moreover, the young boys and girls nowentering ‘secondary education’ come frombroader social sectors. Many of them belong tofamilies that have come into contact with sec-ondary education for the very first time, possessno books or other printed material at home, orhave no access to the new communication andinformation technologies.

In many Latin American countries, bothadults and young people have the feeling—al-though they do not understand exactly why—that the secondary education curriculum is pro-foundly inadequate. The worsening of social in-equalities and this feeling of the inadequacy ofcurricula converge in the day-to-day routine ofeducational establishments, giving rise to situa-tions of violence, apathy or educational com-

CHAPTER II

The challenges of curriculum developmentfor the education of young peoplein Latin America

plicity between pupils and teachers, who arealso at a loss before the novelty and scope ofchallenges that they were never trained to dealwith. These situations tend to take on an addedtwist when the age of the teachers is very closeto that of the students or, on the contrary, veryfar removed.

Traditionally in Latin America, there was nosuch thing as a ‘curriculum’ for secondary edu-cation. What we now refer to as ‘curriculummaterials’ in Latin American secondary educa-tion consisted typically of plans and program-mes.

In the early 1990s, there was a growingawareness that it was worth producing a differ-ent kind of curriculum material, which led to thecurriculum changes already mentioned. As a re-sult of these changes, several Latin Americancountries, in particular Chile, Argentina, Uru-guay and Brazil, have now introduced new cur-riculum guidelines, which take on differentforms, denominations and legal status.

Chile developed a set of Basic Objectives andMinimum Contents (Chile, Ministerio deEducación, 1998b). These guidelines were thenapproved as a national law. In Chile, the educa-tion system operates on a privatized and munici-pal basis. Despite the fact that they are now partof national law, the Basic Objectives and Mini-mum Contents are not mandatory. Nevertheless,feeling the need to commit themselves to a com-mon educational policy, 95% of all educationalestablishments accepted them. In the opinion ofministerial experts and many teachers, these ma-terials do not provide sufficient guidance. As aresult, study programmes were added subse-quently in the form of ‘worksheets’, containingoptions, activities, bibliographies and other

12

types of support for teachers (Chile, Ministeriode Educación, 1998b).

In Argentina, the Federal Council for Cultureand Education, consisting of the ministers of thecountry’s twenty-four provinces and chaired bythe National Minister, issued Common BasicContents graduated by cycles (Argentina,Ministerio de Cultura y Educación, 1997).These contents have to be incorporated in theProvincial Curriculum Designs, but may bemodified for easier teaching.

In Brazil, the national education council,which consists of notables and not of the min-isters of education of the different states,drafted some Curriculum Parameters (Brazil,Ministério da Educação e do Desporto, 1998a;1999) that recognize four levels of specification,but which are intended directly for voluntary useby educational establishments and teachers inthe preparation of the curricular aspects of insti-tutional plans. Uruguay, on the other hand, asmall but centralized country with some 3 mil-lion inhabitants, put forward plans andprogrammes for gradual, mandatory implemen-tation (Uruguay, Administración Nacional deEducación Pública, 1999a, b, c).

The methods of preparing the new curriculummaterials differ from the methods formerly usedto prepare traditional plans and programmes.From the origins of secondary education untilthe 1950s, the latter used to be prepared exclu-sively by a commission of expert teachers in dif-ferent disciplines, in a pedagogic climate inwhich constant updating was not considered anormal procedure. The degree of inertia inherentin this approach to curriculum change tended tosupport only officially approved institutionalstructures and teaching fields and methodolo-gies, while failing to attend to current needs byallowing the incorporation of contents takenfrom new disciplines or fields of knowledge, oreven motivated by the need for improvement inthe quality of education.

As a reaction to this approach to curriculumdevelopment, which emphasized the fragmenta-tion of secondary education into a series of inde-pendent disciplines (Hargreaves, 1982), educa-tionists, experts and officials specializing in theinstitutional design of establishments and theeducation system were called in to help in the

1950s and 1960s. The inertia inherent in thismethod of promoting curricular change tendedto blur the requirements, possibilities and limi-tations of modernizing disciplines and method-ology, since these types of professionals are of-ten not in tune with the creation of new knowl-edge in the different academic fields or in touchwith economic and cultural production.

One response to these situations in the 1990swas the recognition that there were two differenttypes of persons who had to be involved in theprocess of curriculum development: on the onehand actors and protagonists, and on the otheroutside references.

Recent efforts to develop curricula on a na-tional scale have aimed at involving teachers aspartners, but not so much to change the curricu-lum as a standard but to understand the curricu-lum as practised. At the same time, it was as-sumed that teachers need to exchange viewswith non-teachers in order to borrow best prac-tices from them drawn from broader horizons. Itwas also assumed that these non-teachers shouldnot be restricted to educationists and expertsspecializing in curricula and related matters.Teams of scientists and academics were alsobrought in to support proposed changes on thebasis of their own epistemological and scientificexperience.

It is increasingly admitted that mere academic‘updating’ does not provide sufficient justifica-tion for curriculum changes, because academiccontents become rapidly outdated and becausesimply updating content is not the only validreason for undertaking curriculum changes. Thecriteria need to be more closely related to therelevance of changes and their effectiveness interms of imparting new skills. In some cases andto a partial extent, for example in the redevelop-ment of technical and professional education inMexico and for general education in Rio deJaneiro, the involvement is sought of groupswhich earlier used to be known as interlocutorsor outside references. These included business-men, non-governmental organizations, politicalleaders, artists and media professionals, whowere asked for their views about the require-ments of secondary education.

This search for dialogue about the need for cur-riculum changes with contacts outside the actual

13

education system and the academic world haveled to working methodologies that are more ap-propriate for the design of educational methods toreplace the old technical schools, the aim being toprogress towards a multiplicity of careers leadingnot so much to specializations related to broadprofessional families and offering more flexibleand polyvalent working profiles, as to the designof general education for young people. No satis-factory ways have yet been found of involvingparents and the youngsters themselves in the pro-cess of curriculum development.

Apart from the legal status, degree of pre-scription and the quantity and variety of actorsand outside contacts involved in the develop-ment of new curriculum material for secondaryeducation in Latin America, there has been gen-

eral consensus in proposing changes which fa-cilitate the introduction of a more flexible formof education for young people. There is lessstructural rigidity than in the past, while learn-ing content and teaching methods have also beenbrought up to date. Practically all approachestherefore start from the assumption that the aimis to impart competences to young people ratherthan to transmit information to them. Althoughquite significant progress may be said to havebeen made towards achieving this aim if the newcurriculum designs are compared with the old-fashioned plans and programmes, it is still insuf-ficient from the point of view of training youngpeople who are going to be able to learn, to livetogether and to do in the surroundings they willencounter in the twenty-first century.

14

The general view in Latin America is that all at-tempts at curriculum development have to startby accepting the challenge of competence train-ing (Argentina, Ministerio de Cultura yEducación, 1997; Chile, Ministerio deEducación, 1998b; Brazil, Ministério daEducação e do Desporto, 1999).

There has not been a sufficient consensus,however, or enough experience to arrive at adefinition of the concept of competence or atits implementation in practice. It would there-fore be worth keeping the notion of ‘compe-tence’ under constant review. The literature ofmany countries gives a broad definition of whata competence is, conceiving it as ‘knowinghow to do with knowledge and awareness re-garding the impact of that doing’ (Braslavsky,1993). Another way of expressing this samenotion of competence is as an internalized pro-cedure which is being constantly revised andperfected, and which is aimed at solving a ma-terial or spiritual, practical or symbolic prob-lem, while assuming responsibility for the con-sequences.

According to these definitions, a competencewould always need to be assessed in two ways:to personal capacities; and to the socio-culturalbackground and activities of those who are be-ing trained.

The aim should be for schools intended foradolescents and young people to train their cog-nitive, affective and ethical, interactive andpractical capacities all at one and the same time.In simpler terms, they should be taught simulta-neously to know and to learn, to be, to livetogether and to do.

CHAPTER III

The new direction for secondary education:developing competences and identities

In addition, the same schools should be ableto situate these capacities within the context ofareas in which—even if such aspects are interre-lated—social, natural, technological and sym-bolic aspects predominate.

The pedagogic principle underlying the pref-erence for competences as the starting point andobject of the curriculum is that these verycompetences can be inculcated according to dif-ferent contents, methodologies and institutionalmodels, though within a given spectrum of char-acteristics.

If this pedagogic principle is adopted, thiswould also facilitate the simultaneous develop-ment of the different dimensions of youngpeople’s identity, although it would not guaranteeit. If an equitable development of competences isdesired rather than the uniform acquisition ofcontents, then young people should be givenmore opportunity in their schools to develop theaspects of their personalities that differentiatethem. The introduction of competence-orientedcurricula should enable them, for instance, to se-lect contents and activities that would allow themto further develop certain aptitudes or to delvedeeper into topics that attract their interest.

Generally speaking, education should con-tinue to ensure the transmission of adult cultureto the younger generations, but adopting anotherform of dialogue with youthful cultures andwithout claiming that it is still possible to teacheverything to everyone or to offer so many mil-lions of individuals four or five standard educa-tional profiles, as used to be the case in the tradi-tional secondary education systems.

15

The traditional curricula of Latin American sec-ondary education were not suited to organizingeducational experience, that is, an active cur-riculum, or for the training of competences andthe expression of the many dimensions of youngpeoples’ identities. For many decades it wasthought that this might be due purely to theircontent. Nowadays the view is rather that it isalso due to their format. Curricula were struc-tured in such a way that they became dull andrigid. They referred only to some of the aspectsthat affected the quality of learning in schoolsand did so in accordance with an inflexible pre-scriptive logic. Generally, they determined onlywhat had to be taught and they did so in a pre-scriptive manner.

THE CHALLENGE OF COMBININGRICHNESS AND FLEXIBILITY

Everything points nowadays to the need for dif-ferent curriculum frameworks that are flexible,but at the same time rich.

A rich curriculum framework is understood asone that can guide the actors through the dailyeducational routine with respect to a great vari-ety of aspects that affect the quality of learningachieved with students in different schools. It isa framework that refers not only to what has tobe taught, but also what for, why, when, whereand to whom.

A flexible curriculum framework is under-stood as one that can admit variations accordingto the characteristics of the individual establish-ments in which it is being implemented.

Based on the recognition of the new chal-lenges that need to be faced by secondary educa-

tion, a certain consensus appears to haveemerged in Latin America regarding the viewthat new curriculum materials should tend to of-fer guidelines rather than rigid prescriptions, ex-plaining the criteria underlying why those par-ticular guidelines were adopted rather thanothers, giving reference parameters and at thesame time offering alternative ways of usingthose precise criteria with those precise param-eters through examples. Lastly, they should ex-plicitly recognize the right and ability of indi-vidual establishments to come up with betteralternatives than those given as models in thecurriculum itself.

If educational establishments can exercisethis right to design, implement and evaluatetheir own curriculum within the terms of theircontract towards society as public institutions,that is to say, within the framework of sharedcriteria and parameters, then this will furthergenerate initiatives that will in turn enrichnational curriculum frameworks.

In practice, the characteristics of curriculumframeworks currently produced are not uni-form. They are richer in some cases than inothers, more flexible in some than in others.The tendency in the large federated countries isfor new curriculum frameworks to display flex-ibility. In the provinces and states—even inthose which can be compared in size to coun-tries—they are very diversified, while in uni-fied countries they tend to be less flexible.Many provincial curricula for the third cycle ofbasic general education in Argentina, for ex-ample, decide precisely which compulsory cur-riculum subjects or areas will be studied by stu-dents and how the time available is to bedistributed among them.

CHAPTER IV

In search of a new type of curriculumfor the coming decades

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Moreover, while some curriculum materialsdevelop detailed criteria for some aspects, inothers they provide only indicators and param-eters, and in yet other cases solutions or an-swers. For example, in some countries some cur-riculum documents propose basic curriculumstructures—that is, ways of organizing and dis-tributing contents over time—without explain-ing the criteria that underlie the choices. Thismakes it difficult to assess whether that particu-lar structure is good, bad or fair. And when thishappens, it is difficult to initiate any rational dis-cussions about the proposals with anyone whodid not take part in preparing the documents orto overcome the resistances inherent in any pro-cess of change.

FROM FRAGMENTED, HOMOGENEOUSCURRICULUM STRUCTURES TO MOREUNIFIED, DIVERSIFIED STRUCTURES

The old type of study plan consisted of a homo-geneous curriculum structure consisting of twocomponents: a set of subjects and the currentschedules, laid down as weekly workloads dis-tributed identically for all the weeks in theschool year.

In the search for greater flexibility, the newcurricula have tended to replace the concept ofsubjects—for instance in the case of Argentina,documents refer to the concept of ‘curriculumspace’ or area—and they include other compo-nents as part of the curriculum structure and or-ganize the timetable in different ways.

The coexistence of areas, disciplines andworkshops

The new curriculum proposals tend to coincideon the definition of two problems. The first isthat it is not conceivable that students betweenthe ages of 13 and 18 should be subjected to afragmented, compartmentalized structure madeup of twelve to fourteen weekly stimuli. Thesecond is that the requirements in terms of learn-ing to learn, to live together, to know and to docannot be met if all those stimuli take the formof proposals structured around conceptual con-tents that can be merely repeated from teacher to

pupil without going through learning experi-ences involving the students in some way otherthan merely repeating them.

In any event, in practically all countries theintention is to generate reference frameworks,policies and strategies for improving the qualityof and expanding secondary education by pro-posing fewer simultaneous ‘stimuli’, aiming tolimit them to eight or ten, depending on differentcountries and provinces.

To achieve this, three types of strategy are be-ing deployed. The first consists in organizing thestimuli into ‘areas’—which in Chile’s case arecalled sectors and subsectors—rather than sub-jects. The second consists in keeping subjects, butadding the possibility of opting between subjectswithin the same field of knowledge, as in the caseof Argentina’s Polimodal scheme (tenth, eleventhand twelfth years). The third consists in makingtimetable prescriptions more flexible, organizingsome of the stimuli over four terms (Argentinabeing again a case in point).

In the new plans and programmes approvedfor the common basic cycle in Uruguay in 1996and in several Argentine provinces, it was de-cided to replace subjects by areas, especially forthe stage equivalent to what is identified in manyEuropean countries as ‘lower secondary educa-tion’ (seventh, eighth and ninth grades). Theseareas are supposed to be ‘school disciplines’built up from a selection of contents taken fromseveral academic disciplines that use similarprocedures to create knowledge, especially inthe cases of the social and the natural sciences.

In other cases there is a sense of scepticismregarding the possibility of building ‘school dis-ciplines’ that are not based on a solid academictradition. It is argued that school disciplines tendto relate to academic disciplines that have a longtradition and facilitate the learning of a specific‘lexicon, grammar and syntax’. In other words,they argue that a discipline is a way of organiz-ing the interpretation of reality through a seriesof concepts and specific relations, which evolvethough an internal logic. Learning a disciplinewell means also learning a language well—rig-orously and in depth.

In view of the need, therefore, to diminish thequantity of matters every student has to dealwith at the same time and the numbers of stu-

17

dents each teacher has to supervise simulta-neously, it is preferable to introduce options be-tween disciplines and to construct school disci-plines, referred to as areas, with no traditionalbase. For the Polimodal scheme in Argentina,for instance, it was decided that either theschools or the students should opt for three outof five social science disciplines and two out offour natural science disciplines, according to thestudy plan that they have themselves decided tofollow in the tenth, eleventh and twelfth years.

The possibility of opting between related dis-ciplines would enable all students not only tolearn the procedures pertaining to particular ar-eas, but also to gain access to a language withwhich to interpret the world rigorously and indepth. Learning by areas in secondary educa-tion, on the other hand, does not make this pos-sible. On the contrary, it would make secondaryeducation very similar to primary.

The type and number of disciplines aroundwhich the competence training of young peopleshould be structured should depend—in theview of those in favour of keeping them as op-tions—on questions such as the interests ofyoung people, the economic, political and socialcharacteristics of the school’s local environ-ment, and on the availability of resources andknowledge among the teams of teachers makingup each educational establishment.

In order to encourage students more deci-sively to learn how ‘to do’ in the new curriculumframeworks, it is proposed that part of the‘stimuli’ should not be organized according toconceptual contents in the form of ‘subjects’,but by areas or according to end-products or tar-gets to be achieved or the type of educationalactivities to be developed.

In a number of current curriculum documents,guidelines are appearing advocating the organi-zation, for example, of projects, workshops andactivities, which constitutes a great innovationwith respect to the previous plans and program-mes.

Summing up, it would appear that in this searchfor greater flexibility, there are two models of cur-riculum development that are tending to coexist.One of these is closer to the French model—withparallel but more flexible courses as in the case ofChile—and the other closer to the Anglo-Saxon

model, with a common core curriculum. But inboth cases, the possibility of options is introduced,at least in the prescribed areas.

This has meant including criteria according towhich the schools or the students can choose be-tween the proposed subject options. In Chile andin Argentina (which has borrowed from Chile),this new component of curriculum structureshas been dubbed ‘rules of composition’.

In addition to the establishment of transparentand well-thought-out criteria in curriculum ma-terials, the handling of such options by either theschools or the students also requires a strongconsensus in the educational communities and asupportive professional climate in the schools toguide students and help them select options fortheir educational value and not for their assumedfacility, their traditional nature or—on the con-trary—their novelty. Thus, as a consequence ofthis change of curriculum structure, there hasbeen a marked tendency to introduce the func-tions of guidance and tutorship, as somethingmore complex than and different from the oldtype of vocational guidance departments(Krichesky, 1999).

Nevertheless, the introduction of options inthe educational areas remains limited in its prac-tical application due to the scarcity of availableschool time and budgetary constraints. In Ar-gentina, for example, options are used on a na-tional level but have been tending to disappearfrom provincial curricula in the schools of indi-vidual states, especially owing to a seriousshortage of time available for school work.

From limited, pre-distributed time to extended,free time

One of the problems with many of LatinAmerica’s curriculum framework documents isthat teaching contents and methodologies areprescribed in them with no consideration forhow much time will be available to organize realeducational experiences. The problem is furtheraggravated by a tendency to use the plans andprogrammes of European countries as refer-ences for Latin American curriculum develop-ment, without considering the different numberof hours available to students. According to

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Organisation for Economic Co-operation andDevelopment data (1998), in the Netherlands,for example, by the time they have completedtheir first nine years of schooling (not countingthe initial level), boys and girls will have spentapproximately 9,700 hours in class. In Francethe figure is 8,400 and in Germany around7,080. In Mexico, on the other hand, the equiva-lent figure is estimated at 6,600 and in Argentinepublic schooling 6,580.

Many countries are at present planning andeven legislating an increase in the timetableavailable to secondary school students (for in-stance, in Chile and in Uruguay). On the otherhand, some of the new curriculum materials in-novate by proposing definitions and exercisesthat facilitate appropriate decisions regardingthe use of school time by fixing parameters foreach cycle (e.g. the last of basic general educa-tion or lower secondary on one hand and uppersecondary on the other), for each year and foreach curriculum area, and by establishing anumber of hours left at the disposal of schools toenable them to develop plans suited to the needsand possibilities of each establishment.

Lastly, in some countries or provinces, the cur-riculum timetables make provision for free timeallowing schools to try out new ways of organiz-ing and using that time during the school year.Having uniform timetables pre-established eachweek makes it difficult to overcome the fragmen-tation of school activities. Instead, a number ofcountries and provinces are offering a total timeschedule for each cycle in their new curriculummaterials (for sixth, seventh and eighth gradesand for ninth, tenth and eleventh grades), or asimilar alternative, but allowing more flexible useof the schedule. For instance, it is possible to or-ganize some curriculum areas on a half-yearlybasis, by devoting specific amounts of time tosome educational experiences such as workshopsor camps, or by concentrating the time availablefor some disciplines into only one or two years.

THE CURRICULUM’S RESPONSE TOTHE NEED FOR A RENOVATIONOF TEACHING METHODS

In view of current challenges, there is a needfor radical changes in teaching and learning

methodologies that still adhere too closely torepetitive, verbal traditions. Once the desirabil-ity of adopting rich and flexible curriculumframeworks has been recognized, then alterna-tive ways must be found of promoting teachingand learning methodologies different fromthose used in the past, moving away from astandardized, prescriptive approach in class-room work.

Such standardized, prescriptive approachesassume that educational theories need to be en-shrined in State policies. At present some cur-riculum materials and some strategies for theirimplementation subscribe to modern hegemonictheories, especially constructivism. Neverthe-less, most of the curriculum materials recognizethat responding to diversity also implies a de-gree of freedom to adopt and create methodolo-gies that are better suited to individual situationsand groups of students.

In practice, however, many of the problemsencountered with teaching and learning meth-odologies in secondary education may be iden-tified or overcome through arrangementswhich apparently are unrelated to the teachingand learning methodologies themselves. In ef-fect, the arrangements adopted with regard tothe quantity and type of curriculum areaswhich students will need to study each year de-termines, for instance, the possibility of orga-nizing active, participative processes whichwill facilitate the training of enterprise and ac-tion competences. As a result, some countriesare trying to ensure that their curriculum mate-rials, instead of prescribing extensively, in-clude components that enable students to de-ploy different learning strategies and teachersto adopt different teaching strategies, which in-clude the development of research and actionprojects in the local community (on the basis ofthe social sciences, for example). In otherwords, these curricula try to affect educationalchanges by transforming the curriculum archi-tecture and by facilitating a reengineering ofeducational establishments on the basis of thisnew curriculum architecture, and not through achange of rhetoric.

19

Apart from the tendencies to introduce changesin curriculum structures for secondary educa-tion, it is also worth noting four types of innova-tions that tend to recur in all countries and inmost of the provinces or states under consider-ation. The first type refers to teaching contents;the second to language teaching; the third to ob-jectives and characteristics of curriculum ‘areas’for ‘learning to do’; and the fourth to the formsassumed by opening up the school to the youthculture.

THE TENSION BETWEEN NEW ANDOLD CONTENTS

Apart from the usual considerations as towhether to organize the new curricula for sec-ondary education by areas or by disciplines,there has also been a tendency to reconsider thespectrum of reference disciplines, and even ofdisciplines that are directly incorporated in thecurricula, as well as the selection of preferredcontents and methodologies.

In a number of countries, subjects such as ge-ology in the natural sciences, as well as sociol-ogy, political science, anthropology and eco-nomics among the social sciences have beengaining ground, at least as academic sourcesfrom which to build school disciplines. At thesame time, doubts are being raised regardingtraditional school disciplines such as geographyor physics and chemistry.

In any event, even where no subjects havebeen added to or removed from curricula in or-der to avoid any corporate reactions by theteachers of the subjects affected, the selection ofcontents proposed for traditionally accepted

CHAPTER V

New proposals for modern secondary education curriculain Latin America

subjects is being revised to include perspectivesrelated to new academic disciplines outside theschool tradition and to exclude others from tra-ditional disciplines that have become outdated.

Among the natural sciences, ecology is be-coming more influential. In the social sciences,modern topics are being dealt with according toa more investigative and analytical approach, re-placing the previous almost entirely descriptivemethods. In both cases, thought-provoking top-ics are being explicitly introduced, even thoughstill on the periphery of the curriculum.

Questions related to sexuality, poverty, socialinequality, political upheavals and religious cri-ses are being allowed curriculum status to vary-ing degrees. Furthermore, many questions relat-ing to the ethical and social training of youngpeople are being given more emphasis inthe new curricula compared with formerprogrammes. The way controversial questionsare incorporated tends to vary. In the cycleequivalent to lower secondary education, somecurricula opt to include them as transversal is-sues that have to be dealt with in as many differ-ent areas, disciplines and workshops as possible.In other cases, they are incorporated into spe-cific areas, disciplines and workshops.

The specialists tend to agree, however, thatthe right curriculum formulas have not yet beenfound to promote the training of aspects moreclosely related to identities. Some authors referto this shortcoming as a lack of promotion of‘subjectivity’ (Tedesco, 1997). The concept ofsubjectivity in this case is associated not onlywith the handling of information on matters af-fecting the private lives of individual students,but also with an effort to establish criteria—aspersonal values compatible with good social

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cohabitation—applicable to the use of such in-formation in private lives and in the community.

In most countries, a certain academic status isbeginning to be attributed to technology, al-though approaches tend to differ. In Argentina,for example, the emphasis is placed on teachingtechnology in the sense of identifying require-ments, analysing products and designingprojects with a systemic approach in the uppergrades (10, 11 and 12). Chile, on the other hand,tends to give more prominence to managerialtechnologies, while in other countries technol-ogy is almost indiscriminately restricted to in-formation technology and computing.

A number of countries are also starting to re-consider the concepts of aesthetic education andphysical education, trying to relate them more tothe development of sensitivity and expression inyoung people, rather than conceiving them asforms of training for the body, the ear or thehand.

The original approach to aesthetic education,whereby all students had to learn music and theplastic arts, is tending to evolve in three ways:firstly, through the incorporation of other formsof artistic expression, such as the theatre andbody language; secondly, through the search forteaching methods combining art and otherforms of expression; and thirdly, to a lesser ex-tent, through the acceptance once again of thepossibility of opting between different forms ofexpression.

The concept of physical education, tradition-ally tied to military training (Aisenstein, 1996),is being replaced by a more comprehensivetraining of physical capacities in close interac-tion with emotional capacities and with the en-joyment of movement and open air activities.

All countries in the region have tended tomove away from the more deductive, formalisticapproach to mathematics, where the emphasiswas placed on theorems and formulas, towardsan approach oriented more to the solution ofproblems, placing greater emphasis on probabil-ity and statistics.

Another feature which is changing in allcountries is the teaching of the national lan-guage, where the formalistic approach based onthe teaching of grammar is being replaced by agreater emphasis on speech and the written

word. In most cases, the range of writings stud-ied has been extended to include informativeand other non-literary texts. Opinions differ re-garding the desirability of keeping the compul-sory reading of recognized literary works. Insome cases the tradition has been maintained,which indicates that the reading of a selection ofcultural products is still considered to be rel-evant for the training of certain aspects of ashared national identity—while in others it hasbeen dropped.

This reconsideration of the way the nationallanguage is taught is part of a process of dia-logue and debate regarding the broader questionof language teaching in general.

THE QUESTION OF LANGUAGES

The tradition in Latin American secondary edu-cation was to teach the national language and afew foreign languages. Almost without excep-tion, those languages were—in order of prece-dence—French, Italian, English and, in a fewcases, German.

The trend towards globalization and the de-fence of the right to identity have been affectingsome countries—generally the poorest—as adouble force inducing a shift towards a form oflanguage teaching which may be called impov-erished bilingualism. According to this model,in the teaching of a second language emphasis isplaced on its instrumental value, as in the case ofEnglish for international communication insome countries and in others of an indigenouscommunity language. The argument for main-taining the languages of indigenous peoples insecondary education is the importance thatshould be given to linguistic mastery of the codeclosest to the community and family identity asa means of accessing other knowledge.

In many cases English for international com-munication has been progressing at the expenseof other languages which used to be grantedspace in the secondary curriculum. In at leastone highly populated Argentine province, it hasbeen decided that English would be the only for-eign language taught in public schooling andthat class hours and teachers’ workloads previ-ously devoted to teaching French or Italian

21

would be reallocated. Several countries onlyhave English teaching in their official curricula.In those cases, alternative programmes had to beprepared for the teachers of other modern lan-guages. In Argentina, it has been possible toachieve a higher level of abstraction in the ap-proach to foreign-language content, moregeared to the teaching of several languages.

The preservation of traditional languages andthe greater emphasis on English for interna-tional communication cannot be objected to inthemselves. After years of cultural expropria-tion, indigenous peoples have the right to havetheir cultures and languages recognized, repro-duced and enriched. On the other hand, the needfor access to advanced knowledge and the use ofnew technologies based on the English languagemean that English has to be taught at this level ofeducation. It would be worth reflecting, how-ever, on the advisability of moving further alongthe path of poor bilingualism in curricula for thewhole of public secondary education in LatinAmerica.

This approach may in effect still furtherstrengthen an existing sense of a communalghetto (Touraine, 1997) and the partial develop-ment of the individual. There is a danger that allthat can be communicated beyond the local do-main will be foreign products expressed in inter-national communication English. Communitiesrun the risk of becoming entrenched behind lan-guages which in some cases have little writtenoutput. The experiences undergone in a varietyof existing cultures may be lost as far as sharedliving among different traditions is concerned.The communication of feelings and emotionsenriched by the written word may run into seri-ous difficulties.

Moreover, people’s ability to communicatefor the purposes of trade and the exchange oftechnologies and information may be limited asa result of being forced in all their contacts toresort to the intermediate use of English as a for-eign language.

In order to live together in harmony and enjoythe opportunities of an international market,there is a need to maintain and extend policiesthat promote and support far-reaching multilin-gualism in curricula. It would be worth consid-ering in particular the desirability of promoting

the study of Portuguese in Spanish-speakingcountries and Spanish in Brazil, and introducingthe possibility of teaching a varied range of lan-guages facilitating greater contacts with manycultural horizons and studied precisely for thepurpose of promoting such contacts.

LEARNING TO DO: RESEARCH ANDCOMMUNITY ACTION PROJECTS ANDPRODUCTIVE UNDERTAKINGS

Projects are included in different forms in thecurriculum materials of various countries. Themost frequent approaches consist of promotingresearch, community action or productionprojects.

In the case of research projects, young peoplesystematically build up new knowledge forthemselves through academic research. Thesemethods try to familiarize young people with themethodologies and strategies of scientific re-search, though without expecting them to attainadvanced levels. In practice, such projects couldprovide a way of producing contextualizedknowledge that may be new for the area of influ-ence of the school itself, for instance by study-ing the particularities of the local environment,such as water, air, local history, the perception ofreality by local inhabitants, etc.

In the case of community action projects,young people are encouraged to undertake ac-tivities in different areas, such as health preven-tion campaigns, educational assistance for pri-mary schoolchildren, presentation of projects tolocal authorities for approval, environmentalclearance projects, etc.

In the case of productive projects, youngpeople are taught to plan, implement and evalu-ate productive activities of different kinds, espe-cially in the agricultural and service areas, suchas the production of handicrafts or sweets, troutfarming, mushroom growing, horticulture, flow-ers, car repair and maintenance, and others.

Introducing all three types of projects in cur-ricula pursues the same objective, namely en-couraging young people to learn to do, whilestrengthening their capacity to co-operate andlive together. Moreover, these methods try tooffer alternatives to the traditional school

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approach to professional activities through ap-prenticeships in companies, since these are in-creasingly difficult to arrange in the modernworld of production. The accelerating pace oftechnical advances and the sophistication oftechnologies in some areas of production havebeen making top-flight firms reluctant to take onstudents. In addition, the oversimplification ofsome working processes have been makingmany types of jobs unattractive as far as thetraining of young people is concerned.

THE CHANGES IN SECONDARYEDUCATION AND THE CONDITIONOF ADOLESCENTS AND YOUNGPEOPLE

The question of the relation between changes insecondary education and the new status ofyoung people in Latin America is one that hasattracted the least attention in the region. Never-theless, it has recently been given more impor-tance in debates concerning the curriculum andin the approaches adopted in different countries.Brazil, for instance, has been the slowest of thefour countries leading the processes of second-ary education change in the region. It is the firstcountry, however, to assume that the transforma-tion of secondary education must be governedby a policy of building a school for youngpeople. In doing so, it has built upon previousexperience gained by Chile, Uruguay and Ar-gentina in promoting the lives of young peoplein State-run secondary schools. In all countries,moreover, there has been an effort to take advan-tage of isolated attempts to identify links be-tween secondary schools and the lives of youngpeople, especially in establishments run bychurches and other community associations.

This policy of promoting the lives of youngpeople in secondary schools adopted by Argen-tina, Chile and Uruguay has been implementedin three different ways.

In the case of Uruguay, it was left to the initia-tive of teams of teachers in individual schools. Aspart of the reorganization of the use of schooltime, the new curriculum in Uruguay left twohours a week free for individual schools to decideon the best way of using them, and a further two

hours known as the ‘adolescent space’, whichwere intended to meet the needs of adolescentsand to conduct activities of personal interest oraimed at conflict resolution. In practice, in someof the sixty establishments where the new studyplan has been introduced, the extra hours havebeen used for various purposes, such as supple-mentary academic activities, i.e. more classroomhours in languages or mathematics. No clear ef-fort was made to use the time to improve the ac-tual lives of young people in schools.

In the case of Chile, the strategy consisted ofdevoting a specific part of the curriculum, towhich time was allocated, to promote the lives ofyoung people in schools and to initiate projectsbacked up by the purchase of materials andequipment, such as musical instruments, campingequipment, etc. The idea underlying this decisionwas that young people should be able to use theirfree time in schools in pursuit of their own inter-ests by organizing activities which they chooseaccording to their value from their own point ofview and for their benefit as a pastime. Participa-tion in such activities is entirely voluntary. Theirimpact seems to be significant in terms of encour-aging young people to stay on in secondaryschools, though they have not yet been evaluatedin terms of the quality of learning achieved.

In the case of Argentina, as in Uruguay, cur-riculum materials are arranged so that there isfree time for the school to allocate as it chooses.Unlike Uruguay, however, in the case of Argen-tina this time has not yet been institutionalizedas part of the daily routine in schools. Thismeans that, with a few exceptions, the teachersin State schools are not allowed paid workingtime to run the new activities. In any event, thereis plenty of experience in Argentina with orga-nizing camping trips, choirs, bands and commu-nity service.

The promotion of community service hasbeen particularly interesting. The method here isto channel the use young people make of theirtime to attend to the needs and interests of com-munities by undertaking pedagogic activitiesplanned and programmed for their educationalvalue. While youthful initiative is accepted, it iscombined with the responsibility of teachers,since the content of community service activi-ties tends to be decided by the teachers with

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varying degrees of participation by the youngpeople themselves. Their participation in activi-ties may be compulsory. Examples include thesponsoring of schools in difficult situations(frontier schools), the organization of work-shops for dealing with retirement formalities,the organization of workshops to provide extrateaching and educational assistance to childrenfrom low-income families, etc.

The variety of approaches to curriculumchanges introduced in order to convert second-ary schools into real youth establishments showsclearly the need for in-depth dialogue and ex-change regarding the implications of thesechanges. Is it a matter of creating special sub-jects or of producing a new approach to the cur-riculum? If so, which and how?

Generally speaking, it may be accepted thatthe gradual replacement of curriculum struc-tures based on vertical differentiation by sub-jects kept rigidly separate from each other byothers that introduce the possibility of options atthe discretion of schools and students, with theintroduction of new types of curriculum ‘areas’and of more topical and even controversial sub-jects in curricula, constitute ways of relatingsecondary education to the needs of youngpeople. However, if these proposed methods areto lead to a new curriculum in practice, manycomplex changes will need to be introduced inthe daily routine of schools, in the education andtraining of teachers, and in the bodies respon-sible for directing, evaluating and monitoringeducation systems.

24

Adopting curriculum frameworks such as thosedescribed here entails the need to introduce aseries of changes in other arrangements andpractices which are related to the possibility ofmodifying the present curriculum in secondaryschools, of creating establishments for youngpeople which are truly geared to developingtheir capacities and identities, and of evaluatingwhether the curriculum agreed upon reallytranslates into bigger and better forms of learn-ing.

These other arrangements and practices raiseat least four issues. The first is the profile ofteachers; the second is the need to reorganize in-dividual educational establishments; the third isthe governance of education; and the fourth isthe set of procedures used for monitoring andevaluating the impact of curriculum decisionson the learning of young people.

THE CHALLENGES OF CHANGINGTEACHERS’ PROFILES

The tendency in Latin America has been for thetraining of secondary education teachers to fol-low the principle of isomorphism. According tothis principle, teachers have to be trained with aspecialization and a title related to the subjectthat it is assumed they will be teaching. Thus,each time a new disciplinary body is created inthe academic sphere, it is reflected in a simpli-fied form in secondary education through the in-troduction of a new subject of study.

Applying the principle of isomorphism to thetraining of secondary education teachers hadthree negative consequences. Firstly, it intro-duced rigidity into the teachers’ work and per-

CHAPTER VI

Some consequences of adopting a new identityfor the secondary education curriculum

formance. In effect, according to that concept, ageography teacher only understands geographyand could only teach that subject. Secondly, ittended to consolidate the model of fragmentedsecondary education, since if the teachers couldonly teach the content of one discipline and itwas assumed that all disciplines would be taughtsimultaneously for as many years as possible ofsecondary education, it becomes extremely dif-ficult to establish a different model. Thirdly, itconsiderably impoverished the actual training ofthe teachers, since in order to teach a particularsubject it was only necessary to know aboutthat subject, so the training and preparation ofteachers only took into consideration aspects re-lated to one discipline.

As a principle of secondary education teachertraining, isomorphism ignores three key consid-erations. The first is that any teacher must befirst and foremost a ‘teacher’, and only second-arily ‘of something’. This means that theteacher’s capacities have to be clearly geared toeducating young people rather than transmittinginformation ‘about’ something. At the sametime, there is no doubt that a sound knowledgeof disciplines is necessary for any teacher train-ing. But the second matter ignored by isomor-phism is the difference between ‘academicdiscipline’ and ‘school discipline’. In the gen-eral education of pupils, the main function ofknowledge about a discipline is for it to be put touse; this is one of the sources of educatingyoung people through experience with buildingknowledge which can be organized in differentways. This disciplinary knowledge does not initself have the same value as it does in the cre-ation of new knowledge and the constant reorga-nization of the existing store of knowledge.

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‘School disciplines’ must give priority to theeducational value of the knowledge contained in‘academic disciplines’ and make use of thelatter’s procedures and knowledge. With iso-morphism, the former merely become copies ofthe latter or the latter copies of the former, al-though in fact each has its own purpose. The re-sult is that both are impoverished.

The third consideration ignored by isomor-phism is that, in order to use the knowledge of an‘academic discipline’ for the purposes of teach-ing a ‘school discipline’ intended to impart basiccompetences to students, teachers need to pos-sess a broader base than that pertaining to thesingle academic discipline assumed to be the‘parent’ of the school discipline. For instance, inorder to use history to train social competences,teachers have to have a knowledge of other so-cial sciences and a very good mastery of orallanguage, as well as a fair knowledge of statis-tics.

In order to adopt rich, flexible and heteroge-neous curricula, containing a variety of differentcurriculum areas, it will be necessary to over-come isomorphism as the principle linkingteacher training to secondary education, and tooffset the effects of its longstanding acceptanceby means of strategies introduced in the trainingof practising teachers.

In fact, in Latin American countries there arediscrepancies between the supply and demandfor qualified teachers working in secondaryschools, in addition to years of accumulatedbacklog in the training of practising teachers. InUruguay, for example, a high percentage ofteachers working in secondary education do notpossess the proper qualifications. Moreover,22% of them have discipline-related qualifica-tions, but if—according to the Plan ’96 currentlyin effect—they work in the seventh, eighth andninth grades, they should be teaching by cur-riculum areas. The same is true in Argentina inthe Province of Buenos Aires, with a populationof over 8 million inhabitants, and in some of themajor Brazilian states, which also opted for anarea-based curriculum for the stage equivalentto lower secondary education.

In these circumstances there tends to bestrong resistance on the part of the teaching pro-fession to the introduction of curricula orga-

nized by areas. This resistance takes two forms.The first is political. The teachers go in for dec-larations and demonstrations, while their unionsoppose curriculum changes. In Uruguay, strikeswere held and the teachers occupied schoolbuildings alongside the students. This type ofresistance was attenuated as more of the liceosjoined the curriculum reform and also due to adetermined policy of institutional support forschools that accepted to adopt the new curricu-lum, so that the tendency has been for more andmore of the liceos to implement the new curricu-lum.

The second type of resistance to area-basedcurricula manifests itself in the daily school rou-tine. In formal terms, reforms are accepted, butin practice the teachers, instead of teaching aschool discipline called ‘social sciences’ or‘natural sciences’, continued teaching theformer school discipline called ‘geography’ or‘history’, depending on their initial training.

In view of this situation, the authorities areleft with two alternatives. The first would be togive up the policy of change because it is notaccepted by the teachers. This has not been thepolicy followed so far. The second alternativewould be to consider training teachers by tryingto extend their educational horizons instead ofrelying on their existing disciplinary profile. Sofar little headway has been made along this patheither.

It would appear in principle that the issue ofthe training needed by teachers to give effect tothe new curriculum policies is one of the mostserious bottlenecks. This is true from the pointof view not only of its conception and contents,but also of the institutional arrangements thatwould need to be made to produce the range ofprofessional profiles which the scope of the ex-pansion of secondary education enrolment andthe proposed changes appear to require.

Another problem is the challenge of design-ing a new type of initial training for teachers. Inthis respect, various alternatives are being putforward in Latin America. The first alternative,followed for instance by Bolivia, consists intransferring responsibility for all teacher train-ing, including that for secondary educationteachers, to the universities. In the context of thecurriculum changes that are being tried out, it

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would be worth analysing whether this strategywill or will not facilitate efforts to incorporatenon-academic areas or to progress with the di-versification of the type of curriculum areas thatare being introduced in educational establish-ments. The second alternative, followed by Uru-guay, consists in setting up regional teacher-training centres (known locally as CERPs), witha new educational approach including strongerlinks with the local community, the contractingof teachers on a full-time basis and the additionof a research function and other activities con-sidered unusual in the traditional training of sec-ondary schoolteachers (Mancebo, 1999). Thethird alternative, considered by Argentina, con-sists in establishing a Federal Network for Con-tinuing Teacher Training and Retraining, com-prising a number of different schemes run byhigher (non-university) teacher-training col-leges, as well as by universities and other train-ing institutions. In this case, the establishment ofthe network is supplemented with a series ofprovisions introducing changes in every teacher-training college along similar lines to thoseadopted for the CERPs in Uruguay, with mutualrecognition between training colleges and uni-versities. In Argentina, a set of Common BasicContents has been introduced for teacher train-ing (Argentina, Ministerio de Cultura yEducación, 1996), which will tend to breakdown the policy of isomorphism in teacher-training curricula, while maintaining qualifica-tions by disciplines. These new provisions alsoopen the way to intensive co-operation betweentwo previously separate circuits, namely higherteacher training and university, though perhapsnot yet for the establishment of links betweeneducational and academic institutions withothers that are non-academic (Braslavsky, 1999).

In any event, it would appear that the changesmade in the initial training of teachers may yetprove insufficient, both quantitatively and fromthe point of view of the methodological innova-tions they introduce. The use of new technolo-gies and training methods is only just beginning.

There is little experience in terms of strategiesfor horizontal learning among teachers, andeven less for a broadening of the training pro-files of teachers already trained in disciplines tohelp them assume greater teaching responsibili-

ties in some schools, especially in the case ofsmall schools. In Argentina, for example, somedata indicate that a considerable percentage ofsecondary schoolteachers work less than eighthours a week in secondary education, which is adirect result of the prevalence of the principle ofisomorphism and the resulting contracting ofteachers on the basis of teaching hours ratherthan assuming more concentrated workloads.This situation works against any likelihood ofachieving a rich, flexible and heterogeneouscurriculum, offering a variety of options andtypes of activities, by institutional means.

THE INSTITUTIONAL DESIGNOF SECONDARY SCHOOLS AND NEWCURRICULUM MATERIALS

There is a another problem which arises frommaintaining a poor, rigid curriculum and provid-ing teacher training in accordance with the prin-ciple of isomorphism. This is the equally rigid,impoverished institutional organization, com-bined with rules allowing little independence forexisting schools to reorganize themselves andfew possibilities for new schools to be createdalong different lines.

In effect, since in primary schools throughoutLatin America the work of most teachers is gen-erally treated as a half-time occupation (twentyto twenty-five hours a week), it has already beenestablished that teachers’ duties would be ex-pressed in terms of teaching hours. In mostcases, the prevailing rules do not even allowpublic establishments to reach internal agree-ments for reorganizing their activities accordingto decisions taken by their teams of teachers.

In these conditions, it is very difficult to adoptthe new curriculum standards. A flexible cur-riculum presumes that the teacher can take ondifferent subjects and different functions relatedto the general ‘teaching task’ and not merelyteach a single discipline. It assumes curriculumflexibility as an indispensable corollary; for ex-ample, the function of guidance and tutoringwould be a task inherent in any institutionalpractice.

Some working documents aimed at the prepa-ration of new curriculum materials, in Bolivia

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for example, suggest setting up guidance depart-ments as a way of helping to set up and intro-duce a curriculum with options.

In Latin America, the history of such depart-ments is associated with a study structure thatpromotes relatively early specialization andwith the need to help students with their deci-sions prior to specialization. While there isvery little empirical research on how the de-partments operate, there are some indicationsthat they do not always facilitate the guidanceof students. On the other hand, there areschools which have found ways of guiding stu-dents without the need to set up such depart-ments. In the light of these considerations,some of the new curriculum materials are tend-ing to explore ways of drawing attention to theneed for institutional arrangements that per-form a guidance function without the need forguidance departments as such.

The lack of any real teaching career, whichwould allow more experienced and better quali-fied teachers to take on institutional roles andfunctions without giving up their classroomtasks, such as leading teams of teachers withinschools or in networks of several schools, goesagainst the chances of improving the quality ofcollective work by implementing some of thenew curriculum policies. Some countries in theregion have tried to put forward new schemesproviding for different types of teachers. So far,however, these new schemes have not acquiredlegal force.

One last negative factor has been the mainte-nance of a hierarchical, pyramid-shaped oper-ating culture, which has tended to aggravate theisolation of many establishments. In somecases, their isolation is due to the demographicstructure of some regions. But in others, it isdue more to the lack of any tradition linkingschools with each other. In both types of situa-tion, it is possible to design strategies for over-coming isolation by generating new forms oftraining and exchange between teachers, andbetween teams of professionals in different es-tablishments and by promoting linkages, tak-ing advantage of the much greater technologi-cal resources now available in educationalestablishments and in the community in gen-eral.

INSTITUTIONAL ASPECTS OFMANAGING CURRICULUM CHANGE

The views held in earlier periods of modern his-tory regarding the continuity of knowledge overtime, combined with the deterioration of theState system experienced in Latin America,hampered attempts to preserve and modernizethe curriculum and programming and planningunits, which used to exist prior to 1970 in theMinistries of Education of a number of LatinAmerican countries. As a result, an awarenessgrew regarding the need to take up again thechallenge of curriculum change. New curricu-lum development strategies were devised totackle change on a here-and-now basis. In mostcases, these strategies consisted in acquiringequipment by using resources that were avail-able at that time, often derived from interna-tional loans, and de-bureaucratized, that is, keptoutside the Ministries of Education.

There is the impression that the measures takenwere somehow responding to a ‘curriculumemergency’, which also required emergency poli-cies. Once the new curriculum documents hadbeen produced, however, the countries where thecurriculum changes were most advanced began toperceive two new problems.

The first is that if curriculum products are tohave a real impact in schools and become a com-pass for the development of secondary educa-tion, then programming and planning strategieswill also need to be updated. Reducing the num-ber of subjects or curriculum areas, for instance,implies changing the functional layout of educa-tional establishments. This, in turn, may involveteachers working in more than one establish-ment, which have to be interlinked. Moreover,such changes are occurring against a back-ground of a very strong expansion of enrolmentin secondary education. One example worthmentioning is the case of the Province ofMendoza, in Argentina, where in the last fifteenyears educational enrolment grew by 170,000students to a little over 450,000, mainly due tothe greater availability of secondary education.Aspects such as the creation of infrastructureand its maintenance in these circumstances tendto be dealt with increasingly by new institutionalactors, such as city councils.

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As a result, there is no possibility of reallyproducing the type of teaching needed for thenew curricula if the necessary changes are notstrategically planned with the participation of allthose involved, who are increasingly more nu-merous and more diverse. Several provinces andcountries have started experiments in this sense,but the discussions and methodologies have stillbeen far from sufficient to promote any real im-provement in the quality of secondary educationon a par with its expansion in a greater numberand a greater variety of situations.

The second problem is the institutionalizationof the function of curriculum innovation. There isa fear in several countries that once the new cur-riculum materials have been produced, the tem-porary teams in charge will be disbanded, theproducts will freeze and within ten years they willbe back to a situation of lagging behind the needfor innovation. There is also the fear that therights and wrongs will not have been properlyidentified by processes of evaluation, researchand continuous monitoring. Many professionalsinvolved in the changes recognize, moreover, thatin the decade of the 1990s action was taken on thebasis of little systematic research and that the ef-fort to access national, regional and internationalinformation has been colossal to achieve in theend only modest results.

This second group of problems is being metwith a recognition of the need to institutionalizeresearch and curriculum innovation mecha-nisms on a permanent footing. Latin Americanexperience in this respect is extremely poor andout of date. Priority must be given in the circum-stances to learning from other countries in otherregions of the world.

CURRICULUM CHANGE ANDEVALUATION

Even before the process of change began in thecurricula of secondary education in Latin

America, many countries in the region set upnational systems for the evaluation of education,in most cases centred on the evaluation of stu-dents’ learning performance in certain key disci-plines, including languages, mathematics and—to a lesser extent—the social and naturalsciences. In some countries, such as Chile andthe Dominican Republic, all secondary schoolstudents had to sit terminal examinations as farback as the early 1990s.

The effect of these mechanisms and the intro-duction of regular examinations for studentswere to awaken a growing concern for the out-comes of learning and to highlight the problemsof the quality of secondary education in the re-gion (Carnoy & de Moura Castro, 1997). How-ever, little by little the recognition grew that thetype of tests that were being given to studentswere not in tune with the new curriculum guide-lines.

Despite the fact that a great effort is beingmade in many countries to change the criteriaon which examinations are based with a viewto bringing them closer to competence evalua-tions, rather than tests of the mastery of infor-mation, some doubts have remained regardingthe amount that has been achieved in this direc-tion. In any case, the actual topics selected forexaminations tend to limit any efforts to evalu-ate aspects such as whether students in thecourse of secondary education have learned tolearn, to do and to live together. Tests are al-most invariably written, individual and re-stricted to the fields of knowledge referred toearlier.

Within this general context, there are somedifferent experiments which are being con-ducted, for instance in Brazil, where evaluationstrategies and procedures are being developed toassess the acquisition of competences of ahigher degree of complexity than those evalu-ated so far.

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As things stand at present, there is no doubt thatmore international co-operation should be en-couraged. However, while doing so, it is worthbearing in mind at least the following two con-siderations.

In the first place, past experience would ap-pear to indicate that international co-operation ismore productive if it offers broader horizonsthan those of a single region. However, as hasalready been pointed out, in their efforts to pro-mote curriculum changes the countries of LatinAmerica have not only co-operated amongthemselves, but they have also consulted themodels, situations and procedures of countriesoutside Latin America.

Secondly, an analysis of the processes andoutcomes concerning the promotion of curricu-lum change shows that the main problems arisefrom a lack of connection between matters spe-cifically concerning curricula and other aspectsof educational change. It therefore seems thatany co-operation programme must pay particu-lar attention to the range of complexity in-volved, that is to the design and implementa-tion of co-operation strategies and activitieswhich, while they may not avoid some overlapbetween co-operation scenarios and strategies,will take into account the fact that unidimen-sional approaches are not adequate for promot-ing change in such a multidimensional area aseducation.

In the light of these criteria, we outline belowsome suggestions of lines of action for co-opera-tion by UNESCO’s Geneva-based InternationalBureau of Education, while putting forward sug-gestions on how in practice to apply principlesin each case, such as broadening horizons andtackling complexity.

CHAPTER VII

International co-operation for curriculum promotionin Latin America and the role of the IBE

The first line of action refers to research intoand monitoring of the processes and products ofreforms and the processes of curriculum innova-tion. The second deals with the exchange andpromotion of horizontal technical counselling,while the third considers a few aspects related tothe training and preparation of the differentplayers involved with secondary education cur-ricula. For each of these lines of action, it is notonly possible but also desirable to look into dif-ferent alternatives, which themselves may alsobe interconnected.

PROMOTING RESEARCH INTO ANDMONITORING OF PROCESSES ANDPRODUCTS FOR CURRICULUMINNOVATION

As mentioned earlier, one of the major difficul-ties encountered by professional teams respon-sible for promoting curriculum change in sec-ondary education in Latin America is the lack ofdata concerning the processes, products and out-comes related to curriculum changes in differentcountries of the world. In this sense it is worthexamining the initiation of the following activi-ties.

Organizing and supporting a curriculummonitoring observatory

Priority should be given to studying the possi-bility of initiating and supporting a systematic,analytical overview of curriculum processesand materials from different countries, and alsofrom a selected group of provinces and/or local

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governments in the world. In order to remedythis lack of data, it would be advisable in theshort term to set up a modern, efficient mecha-nism that would provide rapid access to a largequantity and variety of curriculum materials. Inprinciple, it would not appear either possible ornecessary to accumulate the whole physicalcollection of available material in one place; itwould be preferable to find ways of standardiz-ing presentations, selecting materials and pro-viding access to them wherever they happen tobe stored; for instance, in large national librar-ies and in educational research institutes.

The mechanism in question could take theform of a curriculum monitoring observatorydesigned to perform these tasks, which wouldmaintain an updated Internet site and wouldpromote exchange activities between the dif-ferent players involved in the process of cur-riculum change. For this purpose a number ofcriteria could be applied, such as disciplinaryfields, political system (including centralizedor federal countries, or countries with greaterexperience, for example, in terms of multi-culturalism and multilingualism), particularsituations or stages of development in second-ary education (e.g. countries and provinces atan advanced stage of expanding their interme-diate education or those which are just startingout), etc.

The type of materials to include in the sitewould be the curricula actually in use in differ-ent countries and provinces classified accordingto various criteria and organized in such a waythat they may be consulted according to the spe-cific interests of users, but there should also beavailable a selection of textbooks, student tests,modules for training teachers in methodologiesor information on how to contact selected cur-riculum organizations, as well as reports on cur-riculum exchange experiences on various scales,such as at the level of countries, provinces, mu-nicipalities, networks of schools and the indi-vidual schools themselves.

The observatory should be set up in accor-dance with common standards and comparableinitiatives worldwide, in order to make it easyto circulate and use its data beyond the homeregion and to have speedy access to the outputof other regions. If the scheme became opera-

tional, then it might be possible to promotesouth-south exchanges, for instance betweenLatin America and Africa, regarding matterssuch as the contribution of curricula to meetingthe challenges of multiculturalism in multilin-gual societies with low levels of economic andsocial development. Exchanges could also bepromoted between groups of countries withsimilar historical traditions, such as those re-lated to the Franco-Prussian curriculum root(which is very different from the Anglo-Saxonone) in order to be able to analyse approachesin depth and the ways in which they are man-aged.

Undertaking comparative research concerninginnovative concepts for curriculum change

As mentioned earlier, the evaluation of learningresults in Latin America is centred on measuringthe acquisition of a set of instrumental contentsrelated to a limited set of student competences.In this respect, both in the region and at the inter-national level progress has been made in stan-dardizing criteria and procedures for evaluatingboth students and teachers.

It is still not clear, however, whether from avery ambitious standpoint curriculum changesare having any sort of impact in terms of meet-ing the major educational challenges facingyoung people in the twenty-first century. Inother words, we know whether young peoplehave acquired a good understanding of math-ematics or languages, but nothing aboutwhether they are learning to learn, to be, to doand to live together. Also very little is knownabout the sort of strategies which might suc-cessfully achieve these objectives, either in theframework of traditional curriculum materials,by disciplines, or in the context of initiatingnew curriculum guidelines that include newprojects and other more dynamic ways of orga-nizing the daily routine of educational estab-lishments.

It would be very useful to undertake compara-tive studies that would identify curriculummethods that have been successful from thepoint of view of training young people to learnto learn, to learn to be, to learn to live together

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and to learn to do. This would also mean under-taking specific studies aimed at the gradual in-troduction of the evaluation of the successachieved by students in the pursuit of these ob-jectives.

Implementing and promoting original,pioneering research following alternativeapproaches

It has been pointed out that there has been a ten-dency to launch curriculum change in secondaryeducation in Latin America based on very littleresearch. Whatever research is available, more-over, tends to concern the teaching side. Veryrarely is any effort made to conduct research inLatin America which might shed light on the ef-fects different curricula have on students in theshort, medium and long term. It would be veryuseful to have original, pioneering research re-sults that could evaluate supply from the point ofview of its meaning for young people and forteachers, or from the point of view of the me-dium- and long-term impact it has on youngpeople’s plans for the future and on their entryinto and performance in the labour market andsociety.

This type of research might also look into as-pects of the relationship between cultural ques-tions and educational processes.

It would be useful, for instance, to undertakecomparative studies of the learning careers (notjust schooling) of adults who are considered‘successful’ from various points of view. For in-stance, this could cover: their entry into thelabour market; their contributions to social soli-darity; their personal well-being; their health; ortheir family well-being. The studies could lookinto the real curricula (including textbooks,teaching models, etc.) with which those adultscame into contact, with a view to arriving at bet-ter working theories regarding curriculumchange in secondary education.

In Europe, Canada and Australia, for instance,there are better traditions regarding this type ofresearch. It would be useful to promote com-parative studies that allow young Latin Ameri-can research teams to become familiar withthese approaches.

FACILITATING HORIZONTALCO-OPERATION

As mentioned earlier, when undertaking cur-riculum changes in the 1990s most of the coun-tries of Latin America, especially those in SouthAmerica, have sought inspiration from the expe-rience of European countries. This is due to thetraditions of secondary education in these coun-tries, which, as also mentioned earlier, are morerooted in continental European models than inAnglo-Saxon models or those from other re-gions of the world. In response to this desire tolearn from the experience of European coun-tries, several Latin American countries madeplans to convene seminars and meetings thatbenefited from the experience of specialistsfrom other countries, especially from otherLatin American and also European countries.

Constructing and keeping up to date adatabase on specialists and institutionsinvolved in promoting curriculum innovation

Convening specialists has always been carriedout on the basis of random working networksand at the expense of great personal effort. Thereis not at this time in the world any register ofspecialists in various disciplines and aspectsconcerning the modernization of contents andmethodologies which would facilitate the selec-tion of persons and institutions in a position tohelp find suitable solutions to problems of cur-riculum development in specific contexts. Hori-zontal co-operation would be greatly facilitatedand would become more comprehensive andmore productive if it were possible to construct adatabase of specialists in curriculum and relatedsubjects that could be consulted in LatinAmerica, but which would also include special-ists from other countries, especially countrieswith shared traditions and challenges.

PROMOTING EXCHANGE ONALTERNATIVE RESPONSES TO SHAREDCHALLENGES

It is both necessary and possible to activate pro-cesses of exchange and dialogue regarding how

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to respond to common challenges. This can helpgenerate better scenarios for each country totake the right decisions and can also save a con-siderable amount of time and material re-sources. In this respect, it would be desirable toinitiate exchanges on two key subjects: firstly oncontents and methodological strategies that pro-mote coexistence beyond national borders; andsecondly on alternative ways of institutionaliz-ing the promotion of evaluation and permanentcurriculum innovation in every country.

Organizing forums, debates and seminars onglobalization processes and the contents ofsecondary education and the trainingof teachers for young people

At the beginning of this paper, we referred to aseries of processes that come under the umbrellaof the term globalization. We also mentioned theexistence of a series of challenges shared by dif-ferent countries, and of the local impacts of dif-ferent global processes. Lastly, we raised thequestion as to whether or not there were anycommon tendencies in the processes of reformand transformation of education systems, whichmight eventually lead to suggestions of a movetowards the configuration of a global educationsystem. In the course of this report, we have pre-sented some evidence regarding the existence ofcertain tendencies, debates and processesshared by very different countries within LatinAmerica, which would seem to give an affirma-tive answer to the latter question from a struc-tural point of view.

Nevertheless, until now there has never beenany systematic dialogue in Latin America whichmight indicate at all reliably whether or notthere are any core contents which should belearned in secondary education in all countriesof the region. These contents should be a meansof promoting better coexistence between thepopulations of different countries, preventinginequalities from growing between them, whilerespecting the diversity of cultures and facilitat-ing a better distribution of scarce employment.

The same themes should be raised for debatewith regard to possible contents for the initialtraining and subsequent retraining of secondaryschoolteachers.

While the prerogative of determining curricu-lum contents rests and must rest with each indi-vidual country, it would seem desirable to pro-mote an open dialogue regarding the contents ofeducation, and its universal, national and localcomponents. The development of informationand communication technologies has now in-validated any educational approach which sug-gests isolating cultures and countries from eachother. The question is therefore raised as towhether the acquisition of shared cultural ele-ments should be left to the dynamic of the mediamarket or whether there might be some inten-tional promotion of certain values and certaincore information by those responsible for educa-tion, in consultation with political, communica-tion, intellectual and scientific leaders.

It would be useful to conduct this dialogue ona freely interactive basis with countries in otherregions of the world which share cultural hori-zons with Latin America, especially Europe andAfrica, considering that Latin American culturehas been shaped from a meeting of three differ-ent and internally heterogeneous cultural hori-zons: that of the indigenous peoples, that of theEuropean countries from which strong immigra-tion originated and that of the African peoples.Major regions with a strong Asiatic culturalpresence that has recently come to the forewould also need to be taken into account.

Ideally, these exchanges should not be re-stricted to officials of the education sector butshould systematically bring in other playerswhose presence is desirable or should bestrengthened in the processes of curriculumchange, such as artists, businessmen, represen-tatives of workers’ associations, members ofnon-governmental and academic organizations,etc.

Organizing exchanges about new ways ofinstitutionalizing innovation, curriculumevaluation and teacher training

The precarious institutional background againstwhich curriculum changes have been takingplace in countries in the forefront of secondaryeducation reform in the region is reaching itslimits. Nevertheless, the way is being indicated

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to the sort of mechanisms needed to promoteprocesses of curriculum change in other coun-tries of the region, which will at the same timeusher in a new institutionalization of permanentinnovation, more closely associated with evalua-tion processes.

In effect, in most of the leading countries theintroduction of curriculum changes has not ben-efited from information obtained from studentevaluation schemes, nor have these schemesbeen updated at the same time as curriculummethods. Furthermore, both of these mecha-nisms have remained only marginally concernedwith the reconsideration of the possibilities andplanning strategies needed to progress withmore foresight in the process of secondary edu-cation change.

The way to change this situation would be toinitiate a process of dialogue and exchange re-garding alternative ways of institutionalizingcurriculum innovation and evaluation. Thisshould also involve the latter’s relation withmore comprehensive educational planning,within the framework of reconsidering the ac-tual concept of planning, the search for abroader and more varied set of players in educa-tion and the existence of very different national,provincial and local situations.

Similarly, more thought must be given to in-stitutional ways of organizing initial trainingand in-service preparation for those currentlyworking in secondary education, as well as forthose who will be attending to the needs of theyoung people who will be educated in the future.A serious review of the situation is called forwith a view to ending isomorphism, overcomingthe undoubted lack of training of those currentlyworking with young people to meet the chal-lenges of the twenty-first century and taking ad-vantage of the opportunities offered by the newcommunication and information technologies.

In these cases, too, it would be advantageousto initiate discussions with contacts in differentregions, countries, provinces and localities whohave actually implemented alternative arrange-ments and who have arrived at some assessmentof the results. In Europe, North America andAustralia, for instance, there are very differentinstitutional ways of promoting innovation andevaluation: either external to the Ministries of

Education, internal or mixed; either combininginnovation and evaluation or keeping themapart; with full State funding or with mixedfunding; etc. It would be very useful in LatinAmerica to be acquainted with these alternativesin order to develop suitable mechanisms foreach country, province or municipality.

In Latin America, alternative ways of organiz-ing initial and in-service training of teachers areless well known. Some very restricted circleshave a limited knowledge of training strategiesapplied in a main or a complementary disciplinein Germany or in other European countries, ornew methods of allowing non-teaching profes-sionals to acquire teacher training in the UnitedKingdom and France. It would be worth gainingmore knowledge of these and other trainingmethods in addition to teacher preparation andthe impact on curricula, both in Latin Americaand in other parts of the world.

Since this exchange would concern institu-tional alternatives, it would be worth consider-ing the possibility of introducing new forms ofexchange, consisting of more than just the orga-nization of seminars and fora. For instance, or-ganizing study travel for officials responsiblefor developing these alternatives, including vis-its and internships, would be very useful. At thesame time, it would be worth involving legisla-tors in the exchanges, since in most cases anycreation of new institutions sooner or later has tobe approved by law.

Owing to the fact that institutionalization al-ternatives involve non-curricular aspects, somethought should be given to organizing these ex-changes in co-operation with other UNESCObodies, such as the International Institute forEducational Planning.

INCORPORATING COMPLEXITY INTHE TRAINING OF THOSE INVOLVEDWITH SECONDARY EDUCATIONCURRICULA

In all the efforts undertaken to promote curricu-lum change in Latin America, extreme discrep-ancies have appeared between the differentplayers involved with curriculum issues with re-gard to their knowledge and their capacities.

34

While the expert knowledge of teachers hasbeen concentrated in the contents of their initialtraining disciplines and in methodologies forteaching those disciplines, the expert knowledgeof curriculum, planning and cost specialists hasnot been sufficient to give them an understand-ing of the changes and trends occurring in theeconomic, political, social and cultural develop-ment of mankind and of individual countries.

The process of curriculum change, however,will only be successful if it achieves a systemicimpact, that is, if it also involves an updating ofcontents and methodologies, changes in the or-ganization and administration of individual es-tablishments, changes in the profiles and work-ing conditions of teachers, a reconsideration ofthe links between educational establishmentsand their connections with other community andsocial institutions. But in order to achieve suchsystemic changes, there is a definite need to im-prove the training of all those concerned withthe process of curriculum change, not only togive them a better grasp of their specialization,but to complement it so that each professionalgroup may incorporate other aspects in theirtraining which will enable them to enter into amore productive dialogue with other profes-sional groups and to achieve greater productiv-ity by incorporating cross-disciplinary andmulti-disciplinary teams.

Promoting training in elements of strategic andsituational planning for specialists in specificdisciplines and for teachers

One of the greatest difficulties with any attemptto expand and change the curricula of secondaryeducation, whether sequentially or in a relatedmanner, is that the teachers and experts involvedin the development and initiation of curriculumchanges do not have an overall vision of thoseprocesses.

This lack of overall vision is one of the rea-sons why, when it comes to putting forwardproposals for curriculum changes, these actorstend to resort to some of the following strate-gies.� They will suggest adding subjects or disci-

plines which are considered innovative, but

without removing any of those that are con-sidered outdated, which imposes a heavyadditional burden without any guarantee ofkeeping more students at school, or of im-proving efficiency or the quality of learn-ing.

� They give up the attempt to produce changesbecause they cannot manage the complexityof the aspects supposedly involved in the pro-cess of introducing changes, or else they makea few efforts at re-engineering in an amateur-ish way, without sufficient methodologicaltools to guarantee greater effectiveness andefficiency for such re-engineering nor thereasonable handling of conflicts between thedifferent groups affected.

The actual curriculum specialists and the teach-ers who take up positions of responsibility or as-sume duties that involve them in the design andimplementation of curriculum changes are fullyaware of these difficulties. This is why they arealways looking for conceptual and methodologi-cal tools that will allow them to complementtheir disciplinary and pedagogical knowledgewith other knowledge needed to deal with cur-riculum changes.

It is therefore worth giving some thought tothe specific professional contributions comingfrom teaching, from the academic world andfrom educational research, so that they can inter-vene in the processes of curriculum change witha greater understanding and a better ability to actin light of the complexity of this process. Ide-ally, such training would be both flexible and in-tensive and would be conducted according to al-ternative methodologies, including the use ofvirtual classes, visits, internships and an im-proved capacity for introducing research com-ponents into activities.

It would be worth developing modules andexperiments to offer this type of training in co-operation with other UNESCO bodies and or-ganizations concerned chiefly with the trainingof educational planners and managers, espe-cially, for instance, with the International Insti-tute of Educational Planning. These modulesshould be administered through specificmechanisms and in agreement with establish-ments responsible for providing teacher train-ing.

35

Helping specialists in planning, curriculumand general education to update theirunderstanding of the structure of current andfuture practical and theoretical knowledge

Just as teachers and educationists are unaware ofthe basic elements of strategic, situational plan-ning required to play an effective and relevantpart in the processes of curriculum change, toavoid or manage conflicts and to achieve moreefficient use of the resources invested, the spe-cialists in planning, curriculum and general edu-cation very often ignore the changes which areoccurring in the structure of present-day practi-cal and theoretical knowledge and in the educa-tional alternatives available, given the advancesin research and in educational innovation allover the world. This lack of awareness alsomakes it difficult for them to anticipate futuresituations. In these circumstances, they maywell propose plans for locating educational es-tablishments, or building schools or otherprojects on the basis of references to past institu-tions rather than to future requirements.

To mention an example: the specialists re-sponsible for planning the infrastructure avail-able to receive the expanding enrolment at inter-mediate level are not always aware what itmeans to teach technology at present in a sec-ondary school or what sort of new requirementsand opportunities are being opened up by infor-mation and communication technologies.

With regard to what it means nowadays toteach technology in a secondary school, it wouldsurely be useful for them to know about the dif-ferences between hard managerial and soft tech-nologies, the discussions taking place aboutthose differences, the implications this has with

regard to establishing possible working relationswith the communities, the use of shared spacesoutside the schools, and relations with busi-nesses, amongst others.

It would also be very useful for them to beaware that the new information and communica-tion technologies make it possible to organizeeducational establishments according to a vari-ety of models, requiring classrooms of very dif-ferent sizes and, in any case, spaces very differ-ent from the classrooms of traditional schools.One particular school project might need verysmall classrooms and another very large ones.Or, for instance, in a dispersed rural area withfifty children, there may be a need for just onevery large classroom, one lecture room and fourcubicles each equipped with four computers.

Some thought should therefore be given to thetype of specific training which should be offeredto professional profiles that do not originate inteaching or education, so that they too can inter-vene in the process of curriculum change withgreater understanding and an improved capacityto act in relation to the new structures of knowl-edge, their changes and connections and the newteaching methodologies. Such training shouldalso be flexible and intensive in practice, in ac-cordance with alternative methodologies, in-cluding the use of virtual classrooms, visits, in-ternships and an improved ability to introduceresearch components into activities.

In this case, the testing of the modules andexperiments should be developed for this type oftraining in agreement with other UNESCO bod-ies and organizations chiefly concerned with thetraining of educational planners and managers,and in particular with UNESCO’s InternationalInstitute of Educational Planning.

36

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TABLE 1. Structure of the education system and position of the intermediate level in selectedLatin American countries

Country Structure of the education system

Argentina Compulsory initial level (1 year)Compulsory basic general education (BGE) over three cycles (9 years):� BGE 1 (3 years)� BGE 2 (3 years)� BGE or third cycle (3 years)Polimodal levelHigher education

Bolivia Compulsory primary education (8 years)Secondary education in two cycles (4 years)

Brazil Basic education:� Nursery education� Compulsory basic general education (8 years)� Intermediate education (3 years)� Higher education

Chile Compulsory basic general education (8 grades)Intermediate education (4 years)Higher education

Colombia Preschool (1 compulsory grade)Compulsory basic education (9 grades) in two cycles:� Primary (5 grades)� Secondary (4 grades)Intermediate education (2 grades)Higher education

Costa Rica Compulsory basic general education with a diversified third cycle (9 years)Diversified education cycle (2 or 3 years)

Dominican Republic Primary education (8 grades)Intermediate education (4 years) in two cycles

Ecuador Primary education (6 grades)Intermediate level (5 years):� Compulsory basic cycle (3 years)� Diversified cycle

ANNEX

39

Mexico Basic education:� Preschool education� Compulsory primary education (6 years)� Secondary education:

Compulsory basic intermediate (3 years)Higher intermediate or Baccalaureate (2 or 3 years diversified)

Higher education

Paraguay Primary education (6 years)Intermediate or diversified level (6 years)� Compulsory common cycle (3 years)� Diversified cycle (3 years)

Peru Primary education (6 grades)Compulsory secondary education (5 years)� Common cycle (2 years)� Diversified cycle (3 years)

Uruguay Primary education (6 grades)Compulsory single basic cycle (3 years)Diversified Baccalaureate (3 years)

Source: Based on national documentation and Braslavsky, 1995.

TABLE 2. Gross school attendance rate in 1985 and 1995 at intermediate level (lower and uppersecondary) in selected Latin American countries

1985 1995

Country Number of years Gross rate Number of years Gross rate

Argentina 5 70 5 77

Bolivia* 4 39 4 –

Brazil** 3 35 3 45

Chile 4 67 4 69

Colombia 6 48 6 67

Costa Rica 5 40 5 50

Dominican Republic 6 51 4 41

Ecuador 6 58 6 50

Mexico 6 57 6 58

Paraguay 6 31 6 38

Peru 5 63 5 70

Uruguay 6 71 6 82

Source: UNESCO, 1998.

** Data prior to structural reform: seven years of primary school plus seven of secondary school** Upper secondary

40

ARGENTINA

� Cecilia BRASLAVSKY

Investigadora CONICET

� Silvia FINOCCHIO

Coordinadoria Area Ciencias Sociales,

Ministerio de Cultura y Educación

� Laura FUMAGALLI

Coordinadora Área de Ciencias

Naturales, Ministerio de Cultura y

Educación

� César LINIETSKY

Coordinador Tecnología y Producción

de Bienes y Servicios, Ministerio de

Cultura y Educación

� Victor MEKLER

Coordinadora Educación Polimodal,

Ministerio de Cultura y Educación

� Sara MELGAR

Coordinadora Lengua y Literatura,

Ministerio de Cultura y Educación

BRAZIL

� Regina DE ASSIS

Consejera de la Carrera de la Educación

Básica, Conselho Nacional de Educacão

List of participants

CHILE

� Jacqueline GYSLING

Coordinadora Historia y Ciencias

Sociales, Ministerio de Educación

����� Isabel SOTO

Coordinadora Matemáticas, Ministerio

de Educación

� Luis VAISMAN

Coordinador Lengua Castellana y

Comunicación, Ministerio de

Educación

URUGUAY

� Gabriel DÍAZ MAGGIOLI

Inspector de Inglés

� Nora GAYNICOTCHE

Diseño Curricular en Enseñanza Media

y en Formación Docente

� María ROLAND

Grupo de Apoyo de Ciencias Sociales

� Margarita ROMERO

Inspectora de Área Lengua y Literatura

Theinternational

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THE SECONDARY EDUCATIONCURRICULUM

IN LATIN AMERICA:

NEW TENDENCIES AND CHANGESCecilia Braslavsky

FINAL REPORT OF THE SEMINAR ORGANIZED BY THEINTERNATIONAL BUREAU OF EDUCATION

AND HELD AT THEINTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR EDUCATIONAL PLANNING,

2–3 SEPTEMBER 1999, BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

INTERNATIONAL BUREAU OF EDUCATION