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A Survey of Elementary and Secondary Education in Latin America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Thomas B. Davis
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Extract

Latin-American education today bears more resemblance to its ineffective past than to the great and good plans which its educators have regularly got incorporated into law. For two generations all the southern republics have passed constitutional provisions guaranteeing free and compulsory education. Haiti has carried such a provision in its legal code since 1871, yet today 92 per cent of its people are illiterate.

The percentage figure ranges somewhat lower for the other countries, but the basic situation remains the same. As H. W. Spiegel reported in The Brazilian Economy: “At present no more than one-third of Brazil's child population attends school. Schools, including the elementary, are overcrowded. Teachers are scarce. Education opportunities for higher training are poor and expensive. During 1940 to 1944, seventyeight per cent of the immigrants were literate; in 1940 only thirty-two per cent of the native Brazilians were literate.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Inter-American Studies , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , January 1961 , pp. 97 - 120
Copyright
Copyright © University of Miami 1961

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References

page 116 note * Sample figures: In Nicaragua, a secondary-school teacher receives the equivalent of $66 U.S. per month for thirty hours teaching. In urban, secondary schools in Bolivia, a teacher receives from $614 to $661 per year.

In Guatemala the basic salary for an elementary school principal is sixty quetzales ($60) per month, with ten quetzales extra if he teaches in the night school.

Since 1943, the salaries of Chilean teachers have increased eighty per cent over those of 1929, so that the basic salary for secondary-school teachers is 1,000 pesos per year. (One Chilean peso equals four cents, American currency.) The cost of living has risen in Chile 136 per cent over the 1929 figure. [Data as of 1945.]

By contrast, the United States Commissioner of Education reported that in 1950 the United States spent an average of $213 on the education of each publicschool student. Local school boards paid their teachers an average salary of $3,080. Even so, in the United States the school system was suffering an alarming loss of teachers to higher-paying posts in business, industry, and government service.

page 117 note * Because of the intensity and breadth of the secondary school program in Latin America (and it requires from five to six years beyond the elementary level to complete), college registrars in the United States customarily evaluate the liceo diploma as equivalent to two years of college work.