08/08/2021 19:55
Clarín.com
Opinion
Updated 08/08/2021 19:55
"If you think
education is expensive, try ignorance
." Awarded to Derek Bok, former president of Harvard, the authorship of the phrase can be disputed but not its veracity. Days ago, a comment from the president of Toyota triggered the alarms: the automaker needed to fill
200 jobs
to expand its assembly line at its Zárate plant and was
unable to find
applicants who met the minimum requirement to enter the company, which was just have the
full secondary
. More than the revelation, the astonishment it generated is striking: that of Argentine education is the chronicle of a tragedy many times announced.
In a work for the Observatorio Argentinos por la Educación, Mariano Narodowski analyzed what happens with secondary schools in the Zárate area: there is no lack of graduates. But of the 1,314 students who finished 6th year there in 2018,
only 2%
belonged to the
lowest
third
of income
: adding those from neighboring areas, only
31 men
who could be tempted for the job offered. The same is true here as in the rest of the country: the
vast
majority of
secondary graduates
are
women
, and of
medium or high socioeconomic status
, who according to experts on the subject, generally choose to pursue tertiary or university studies.
Another worrying piece of information creeps in here: the one that associates
education with poverty
. Boys from poorer households tend to drop out of school to work. The circle becomes increasingly vicious: the less educational training, the worse the level of jobs they get, with lower salaries, a higher level of precariousness, more informality and fewer associated benefits, such as access to a health coverage system.
Of the 2,230,000 unemployed, 1.2 million are under 29 years of age:
more than half
of the
unemployed are young people or adolescents
. According to data given by
the Indec on Wednesday, are already
six million
the
boys and girls living in poverty
: among those under 14 years grew from 51.2% to 53.6% in the period from the first quarter of 2020 to the same period of 2021, even despite social benefits. And the most alarming thing is that child poverty has been on the rise since the second half of 2017 (39.7%), with a peak of 62.9% in the fourth quarter of last year.
It is interesting to take a look at the
Learn tests
: the 2019 report, released last year, indicates that
71.4% of students
finish secondary school with
knowledge of Mathematics between basic and below basic
: the latter are 4 out of 10. Only 28.6% achieve satisfactory performance in the last year of study. The downward trend in the level of what they know, although barely perceptible, is accentuated with the passing of the years and with the tests. This is also where the socioeconomic level comes into play: according to the experts, when analyzing the tests, 13 out of 100 boys in the low level show satisfactory or advanced performance, compared to 55 out of 100 in the high socioeconomic level.
Not to mention the
difficulties when it comes to understanding a text
, which even implies problems in everyday life by not understanding instructions. A calculation by the Observatory indicates, dividing households into five equal parts (quintiles) according to their income level, that the difference in access to secondary education between the poorest and the richest quintiles is 12%.
The
50% of children
entering the
child does not finish
. Therein lies its greatest crisis: it works by incorporating them but
fails to retain them
. The pandemic only deepened the problem: an estimated
1.5 million students dropped out of school
after the quarantine
. According to some reports, 8 out of 10 boys from popular neighborhoods used the telephone as their main means of communication with the school.
Surprisingly, when Argentines are asked in the polls about the
issues that concern them the most, education does not figure at the top
: it appears averaging sixth place. Despite what is claimed, - "For us, education is the future," said Alberto Fernández - it would not seem to occupy a relevant place in real official concerns either: the school quarantine was one of the longest in the world. And although in campaign
education is mentioned in speeches
,
plans
to address it are
conspicuous by their absence
. Here we are.