Poor showing for DR education

[NewsWhore]

Cuba shows up as the best and the Dominican Republic as the worst in a study of third and sixth graders in 16 countries in the region, as well as the state of Nuevo Leon in Mexico. A total of 196,000 students, 8,854 classrooms and 3,065 urban schools were part of the four-year study, which was conducted by the Latin American Laboratory for Quality Evaluation under the aegis of the United Nations Education, Science and Culture Organization (UNESCO). Today's A.M. editorial in Diario Libre, written by Adriano Miguel Tejada, himself an educator, states that Dominican education has "never been good, despite the myth about the old schools." Tejada says that schools used to cater for very few people and the teachers were barely high school graduates. The big contrast was with the total ignorance of the general population. In that context, students and teachers were geniuses. Tejada, himself a product of this older system, says that this does not take any merit from those teachers, who did their best and who had a real vocation, but it does give the right perspective. After Trujillo's assassination, education took two mortal blows: politics and large-scale growth. Both led to the creation of private schools without being truly elite. All over the world, the elite sends their children to private schools, either locally or overseas, but here, all the parents who wanted to educate their children within the proper timeframe had to pay for it, and the quality of education suffered, although it appeared that it was better than the public schools, themselves affected by student mobilizations and taken over by "toughs" that scared the middle class away forever. Because of this, according to the editor-professor, despite having a very high percentage of students in private schools, some of these very good, Dominican education never climbed a point, as evidenced by the studies of mathematics that have been carried out since the 1980s, because, in reality, the parents not only pay for education but also for the protection of their children in a safe environment, even though they have to carry their own chairs to school every day like they do in the barrios.

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