From Straits to Optimism: Education in the Americas

Unequal Schools, Unequal Chances: The Challenge of Equal Opportunity in the Americas. Edited by Fernando Reimers. (Cambridge, MA: The David Rockefeller Center Series on Latin American Studies, Harvard University, 2000. Pp. 464. $24.95 paper.)

Children's Work, Schooling and Welfare in Latin America. By David Post. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002. Pp. 284. $38.00 paper.)

Schooling for Success: Preventing Repetition and Dropout in Latin American Primary Schools. Edited by Laura Randall and Joan B. Anderson. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999. Pp. 338. $78.95 cloth, $35.95 paper.)

Distant Alliances: Promoting Education for Girls and Women in Latin America. Edited by Regina Cortina and Nelly P. Stromquist. (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2000. Pp. 316. $95.00 cloth.)

We Are All Equal: Student Culture and Identity at a Mexican Secondary School, 1988-1998. By Bradley A. U. Levinson. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Pp. 432. $84.95 cloth, $25.95 paper.)

Education in the New Latino Diaspora: Policy and the Politics of Identity. Edited by Stanton Worthan, Enrique G. Murillo Jr., and Edmund T. Hamann. (Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing, 2002. Pp. 264. $82.95 cloth, $30.00 paper.)

Imagining Teachers: Rethinking Gender Dynamics in Teacher Education. By Gustavo E. Fischman. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000. Pp. 211. $85.00 cloth, $27.00 paper.)

Reinventing Paulo Freire: A Pedagogy of Love. By Antonia Darder. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002. Pp. 274. $85.00 cloth, $27.00 paper.)

The debates around education have not changed in nature since the early twentieth century but their emphasis has. At the outset, education was the promise of progress for a nation, a tool individuals should use to increase their well-being, a means to elevate in society and mitigate poverty. In 1920 José Vasconcelos, the legendary first Secretary of Public Education in Mexico, ascertained that there were two main problems in the country: misery and ignorance, the former a consequence of the latter. Education for all would solve those afflictions and would unite the nation by its culture, not by force, authority, or the power of the state.

However, the sorry situation all over Latin America stood in acute contrast to the buoyant optimism on education. Only when the failure of the state to deliver educational and other social services began to be evident, did social scientists start to question the validity of the educationalist argument. In the United States and Europe, the controversies over schooling in the 1970s were between the defenders of the educational ideal of progress and happiness and those radicals who claimed that instruction and training were tools for social control, reproducing inequalities in the economy and in society. The works of Pierre Bourdieu, Martin Carnoy, and Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, and Marxist thinkers, like Louis Althusser, became popular among scholars, teachers, and political activists in Latin America.¹

In contrast to this radical approach was the consensus view of education based on a structural-functional paradigm. This approach encompassed a notion of function as a link between (relatively) stable structural categories of social life; any processes or conditions that did not contribute to the existence and evolution of society were dysfunctional. The principal emphasis of this perspective was on stability of the society, as well as the social integration and effectiveness of the social system. Underlying these emphases was an explicit assumption of the universal ordering of such conditions and human nature.² The role of education in this framework was to "socialize" children into adult life, instilling the norms of behavior and shaping personalities to make them accept the demands of the social order.

Reproductionist approaches, although convincing in many of their contentions, were irrelevant for the masses of workers and peasants, who demanded more education and further opportunities for their offspring to attend school as a mechanism to move up the social ladder. Although the radical approach is seldom used, it is common...