Education: Why Asia is Better than Chile

Can't speaky eengleesh? In an article about Latin America's poor economic growth, Andrés Oppenheimer helps explain why. Latin America is buzzing off high commodities prices yet economic growth is lower than Africa let alone Eastern Europe and Asia. What's at the root of this? It's the education, stupid (I couldn't resist). Writes Oppenheimer:

...the most troubling trend for Latin America is its stagnation in education, science and technology. While Asians and Eastern Europeans are creating increasingly highly skilled labor forces, most Latin American countries have barely modified their outdated education systems.

In China, to my surprise, I learned that children in all public schools begin English-language classes in third grade, four hours a week. I asked Mexico's education minister a few weeks later what grade Mexican public-school students start studying English. The answer: seventh grade, two hours a week.

...Many Mexicans, Argentines and other Latin Americans believe their big, state-run universities are great, but they're actually pretty mediocre. The Times of London's 2007 ranking of the world's 200 best universities features only three Latin American universities, at the very bottom of the list: the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil (178th,) the University of Campinas, Brazil (179th), and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (195th). About a dozen universities from China, Singapore and South Korea rank much higher.

Oppenheimer is nakedly neoliberal, so I'm going to throw out the bathwater, not the baby. The problem isn't necessarily that these schools are "state-run", as he slyly suggests. The problem is just that the overall culture of education in Latin America sucks balls.

In Chile, education was privatized by the military junta. Still sucks balls.

Bad University Education in Chile
What better proof that university education in Chile sucks, than to look at the pathetic defense given it by one of its strongest proponents, Carlos Peña, rector of the private Chilean university Diego Portales. Pictured here:



Worth noting that he's been panned as a hack by one of Chile's most respected historians, albeit a bit pugnacious, Alfredo Jocelyn-Holt Letelier. On a personal note, this Alfredo resembles Me in 40 years, but I only recently discovered this image and my affinity for him dates further back, based on his Mind, not his looks:



The Santiago Times, nevertheless, calls it a "comprehensive analysis", dutifully translating Peña's erratic elegiac to countless unaccredited universities in Chile. Writes Peña:

We have a very diverse higher educational system...There is also a great deal of variation in the way these higher education institutions are governed...There are also, of course, different levels of quality. Some are extremely complex institutions, like the University of Chile or Catholic University. Some are led only by their professors. Some have been accredited, some have not been. Some are very selective, and others enroll any student who signs up.

Great, so students with horrible grades, learning disabilities, or whatever can spend a boatload of money to go to an unaccredited university on the false promise of an improved life, that a degree from one of these snake-oil salesmen will propel them into higher social status, and that somehow they won't end up working as diaper-wearing grocery store clerks earning US$2/hr, if employed at all.

At this point, one would expect Peña to forcefully lambast the charlatans who profit on the folly of their compatriots. Or at least disassociate his supposedly prestigious institution from them. He does neither:

It is likely that the different attributes of the system, mixed together, have all worked together to get us were we are (See my piece on The Santiago Typos). The fact that the system is largely privately owned has contributed to its radical growth. And this would not be possible if not for the fact that the institutions are stratified into different levels of selectivity.

I'm not making this up. This is an open and explicit admission that profit trumps quality in Chile's highly profitable business of education.

In fact, Peña openly encourages the proliferation of crappy, unaccredited schools as fundamental "attributes of the system, mixed together to get us [where] we are".

Which, according to Peña, is a good place. I don't think Oppenheimer would agree. But I should read his book, "Cuentos Chinos", that he wrote about the real state of Latin American economy. Perhaps he'll show that Chile is leading Latin America, but I doubt it. No Chilean schools showed up on the Times of London Top 200.

If you can read Spanish you can also beat me to it, click here to buy the book.

Just remember that Oppenheimer seems to decry "state-run" education in Latin America. He notes that education in Asia is better than Latin America. Yet Peña is careful to point out how his country's diverse and privatized educational system "distinguishes Chile from other countries like Japan and South Korea." Oppenheimer noted a distinction as well: Asian schools are better.