Public Policy and Educational Management in Latin America:
Global Discourse and Local Realities

Benno Sander
Internatinal Education Consultant

Keynote address delivered at the Fifth Latin American Congress on
Educational Administration, held on May 2-3, 2002, at Santiago, Chile.
Published in Pensamiento Educativo, Santiago, Chile, v. 31, p. 13-30, 2002

The Fifth Latin American Congress on Education Administration, held on May 2-3, 2002, at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, offers a rich opportunity to rethink our Latin American history in order to deepen our understanding and interpretation of events that have shaped our existence, including our education.

The purpose of my reflection is to examine the Latin American experience in the areas of public policy and educational management in an international context.1   Given the breadth and complexity of the subject matter, the first part of this reflection is confined to a brief exercise to deconstruct and reconstruct certain political-pedagogical contributions in our Latin American history.  This leads into an analysis, in the second part, of some of the many challenges facing us today in the field of public policy and educational management.

A chronicle of political, economic,
and cultural moments and movements

For the purposes of this exercise, I have selected five moments and movements that determined the course of Latin American education in recent centuries.  The objective here is to further the search for explanations for the problems we are facing in educational administration at the political-institutional level and in the daily life of schools and universities.

I am aware that my choice of moments and movements in Latin American education is based on my own selective bias and reflects a particular vision of education and society.   I am also aware that my perception and interpretation of political and educational events represents just one of many possible readings, since we all have our own unique reading of history.  For this reason, meetings such as this one are ideal occasions to reflect together on our history, our realities, and on our common or differing challenges as we explore points of convergence and divergence in the different readings, different perceptions, and different interpretations of political and educational actions and events.  Proof of this is the richness of the lessons derived from examining the different conceptual and analytical approaches taken in the papers presented at this Latin American Congress.  With these introductory remarks, I now proceed to the first moment.

The moment of colonization

The first moment in the past five centuries of our history occurred when two worlds met, or failed to meet, in 1492 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and eight years later in Porto Seguro, Bahia State, Brazil.  This was a meeting of the world of the homeowners and the world of the visitors.  The world of native peoples and the world of Latin peoples.  The world of the conquered and the world of the conquerors.

I view this first moment in our history as symptomatic of a broader movement, of an historical process that some call a civilizing process, others define as a colonizing process, and many people today prefer to describe as a globalizing process.  At the time, Europe was at the forefront of such processes, which appeared for the first time in our Latin American latitudes.  This historical movement of humanity is associated with powerful expansion and internationalization processes.  Expansion of property and trade, expansion of power, expansion of faith.  In other words, economic conquest, political conquest, and cultural conquest.

The cultural conquest was accomplished through the systematic transplant of Christian values and practices, and of artistic expression and educational traditions, from the predominantly Latin countries of continental Europe to the New World. The cultural conquest, with its profoundly Latin roots, evokes for me the provocative concept of “globalatinization” developed by Derrida in his book, Acts of Religion.2

In the education field, knowledge, values, and social practices were transplanted through faith-based public education.  This task was entrusted to Spanish Missionaries, natural transmitters of the Latin culture, a culture that historically had developed in Lazio and had as its political center Rome, the city where the Christian church established its headquarters.  In this way, Latin became the official language of the Catholic Church and, as the globalatinization process advanced, the official language of education in the main European kingdoms and principalities.  This was the context for the evangelization of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.  In practice, the native values, beliefs, and rituals of the Americas felt threatened by the imposition of the Latin values, beliefs, and rituals emanating from Europe.  In other words, the Latin began to encroach on the space of the native.

An examination of social and intellectual movements in Latin America reveals little autochthonous theoretical progress during the colonial period in the specific field of education and educational management.  Indeed, the educational policy adopted in the Iberian colonies of the Americas was a replica of the policy adopted by the European monarchies.  It was an elitist policy that mainly served the dominant social class.  It was a faith-based public policy that used priests to teach students obedience and respect for God, as well as for the authorities created and imposed by the monarchies. Ultimately, it was a discriminatory educational policy from the standpoint of social class, ethnic group, and gender. 

Countless attempts were made over the years to influence colonial education policy in our countries.  For many years, however, the outcomes fell far short of public aspirations.  Growing awareness about the lack of a Latin American pedagogic tradition and the absence of a public education policy committed to education for citizenship and defense of national sovereignty was a galvanizing force behind movements leading up to the emancipation of our countries in the nineteenth century.  Educational reform in Latin America was to become, then, the fundamental challenge of a new historical moment.

The moment of political independence

The second moment in our educational history emerged with the political independence of our countries, influenced by the liberal ideas emanating from Europe and the United States. Philosophical constructs that fermented within the movements that would lead us to independence left an indelible mark on our social institutions, including education. While Horace Mann is considered the father of North American public education, Andres Bello would become the shining star who definitively shaped Latin American education. He was followed by other important figures such as: Simón Rodríguez in Venezuela; Domingo Faustino Sarmiento in Argentina; Benito Juárez and Gabino Barreda in Mexico; José Pedro Varela in Uruguay; Enrique José Varona in Cuba; Eugenio María de Hostos in Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo, and Rui Barbosa in Brazil; and finally, besides the pioneering work of Andres Bello in Chile, the leadership of José Abelardo Núñez and Enrique Molina and later, Darío Salas and Oscar Vera.  These were true statesmen of education and culture who were at the forefront of movements advocating for public schooling and its social role as a tool for achieving equality of social opportunity in newly independent Latin American countries.

As public education evolved, and influenced by the positivist principles imported from Europe, nation-states adopted powerful tools geared toward the centralized control and standardization of teaching. Our schools sought to transmit a universal content through an encyclopedic curriculum; they endorsed a primarily empirical methodology and adopted mainly regulatory procedures for the organization and management of school systems and institutions.

 In the broader context of the western world, positivism also shed light on classical theories of administration conceived and adopted at the dawn of the twentieth century, in particular, Fayolism in France, Taylorism in North America, and the Weberian bureaucratic model of the Anglo-Saxons.  Management trends emerging out of the classical school spread rapidly throughout the world, permeating different thematic areas of administration, including education. Latin America was no exception to this.  In effect, the global discourse that informed the social sciences, and public and business administration at the time, influenced the intellectual production of many of our early theoreticians on school administration for decades.  Intellectuals in the fields of education and culture, however, increasingly questioned the classical discourse, thereby setting the stage for a new political-pedagogical movement.

The renovating moment of the New School

The third moment occurred in the 1930s, when a genuine movement took hold in different parts of Latin America to counter the positivist and functionalist social theories dominating Western thought and intellectual production at that time.  This is the era of the progressive and pragmatic New School, pioneered by John Dewey in the United States and later reinterpreted by his Latin American disciples, including Anísio Teixeira in Brazil and Darío Salas in Chile, both of whom had studied with Dewey at Columbia University in New York.

The educational renovation movements that proliferated in Latin America at that time were symptomatic of an historical confluence of factors relating to economic development, social progress, and political maturity. Indeed, the New School had a transcendental political impact and is still a benchmark for a vision of public education committed to the promotion and defense of national interests in the international context. In the field of educational management, pioneers of the New School challenged advocates of principles and practices adopted or adapted from the business management theories developed in Europe and the United States in the early 1900s. The political and sociological approaches of New School proponents made it possible to overcome the conservative tendency of business administration theories imported from abroad and often adapted mimetically, or mechanically, in our countries. Meanwhile, as the pioneers and conservatives sparred, new international economic and political events set the stage for a new moment in Latin American Education.

The moment of economy in education

The fourth moment has to do with economists working on the economy of development, administration, and education.  This moment, in which economic logic dictated public policy in the areas of education, administration, and national development, is linked to a series of international movements centered on the need to administer technical assistance and financial aid services in the postwar period. This was the prevailing economic logic that informed Marshall Plan programs in Europe and Alliance for Progress programs in the Americas.

In Latin America, the economic approach to the modernization of public administration in the 1960s and 1970s, was introduced mainly by international consultants and foreign authors, together with their Latin American disciples. At that time, public policy in the educational organization and management field was rooted in international movements promoting administration for development, the economy of education, human resource planning, theories of human capital, and investment in human beings and their performance individually and socially.  Government planning was a product of the economic logic behind these movements and, within it, educational planning, both strongly propelled by technical and financial assistance institutions from developed countries, inter-governmental entities for international cooperation, and multilateral lending institutions.

A central feature of the developmentalist stage was the optimistic conviction that education was the driving force behind economic growth, the principal tool for technical progress, and a powerful vehicle for social selection and upward mobility. Unquestionably, significant progress was made in Latin American education as a result of the economic initiative of this period, particularly in terms of the quantitative growth in primary schools, secondary schools, universities, enrollment, and number of graduates. The economists in education movement, however, lost momentum in the 1970s due to depleted financial resources and the growing internal strangulation caused by foreign debt.  As subsequent events have shown, the investment in education failed to produce the anticipated dividends in terms of economic growth and technological advancement, much less sustainable human development with social equity.  History has shown that economic value is a necessary but insufficient element of public policy and educational management.  What the developmentalist phase of Latin American education lacked was a commitment to prioritize education for citizenship, including defense of human rights, democracy, and grassroots participation. This conclusion leads us to a new moment.

The moment of democratic construction

The fifth moment in my historical exposé is the moment of democracy, of civil society organization and resistance, of rescue and respect for human rights, of environmental protection and quality of life.  Intellectuals from the militant democratic resistance active in Latin America and beyond our borders during the developmentalist phase prepared the terrain for this moment.  A new Latin American way of thinking flourished in the social sciences, a sort of political antithesis to the developmentalist thesis.  Here ECLA’s “theory of dependence” tands out, together with other contributions from the vanguard of economics, sociology, administration, and pedagogy.  Our leader in the education field was Pablo Freire3 who began, in the 1960s, to develop one of the most audacious pedagogical works of the twentieth century; today his work is required reading for students of international education.

 In the field of educational policy and management, the democratic construction phase of recent years was a period rich in learning and maturation for the academics and specialists in our universities and school systems. During this period, a significant critical effort was made to evaluate our experiences in educational organization and administration and to try out new theoretical approaches and practices in educational management.  At the same time, these past few decades have been a time of intense debate over the epistemological premises underlying our education administration theories.

Rather than simply enumerating the valuable individual contributions of critical thinkers and social actors that enriched the political-pedagogical debate and practice during this phase, it would be more useful to note some of the issues that captured our collective attention.  Indeed, those of us devoted to the study and practice of education and its administration learn far more from approaches that regard educational administration as a pedagogical or academic exercise, rather than merely an economic or business exercise born of administrative theories borrowed from the business world. We all learn from educational administration perspectives that emphasize the policy dimension over the purely bureaucratic dimension.  We all learn from studies on the importance of the political effectiveness and cultural relevance of the public policy and educational management paradigms traditionally adopted in Latin America. We all learn from the study and experiences of decentralization and local management of education. We all learn from studies and debates concerning democratic management of education and from the experiences of electing school principals and university presidents.  Ultimately, we all learn from debates and studies on the pedagogy of the oppressed and the pedagogy of autonomy and hope, and on education for citizenship, human rights, and quality of life.   This initial inventory of movements and intellectual and praxiological contributions to the field of educational management clearly shaped the past few decades and surely its significance should guide our reflections and actions as we confront the new challenges in Latin American education today.

New challenges at the start of a new century marked
by globalization and renewed attention to governance

I return to the first moment of our history—when two worlds met five centuries ago—to suggest that today, like yesterday, the civilizing process continues; that today, like yesterday, the colonizing process continues; and that today, like yesterday, the globalizing process continues.  What is new today is that the protagonists have changed, the times have changed, and the settings have changed.   These changes are fueled largely by the revolution in the world of information and communications, instruments par excellence of the new transnational capitalism.  In this way, the new global information society has been consolidated, rooted in a new economy, and premised on the efficient use of knowledge.

With the globalization of the economy and human activity, the past two decades have featured a renewed interest in the study of administration at the international level, with a focus on the concept of governance. This new interest has led to a proliferation of national and international initiatives for institutional and administrative reform. Such initiatives occur in the business world as well as in government agencies, and are dictated by powerful international political and economic forces.

In this regard, the past two decades have featured a growing demand for smaller, more efficient governments.  This has led to a dangerous atrophy in the role of nation-states in many countries of the North and South.  At the same time, social demands for more government programs and better services have intensified.  Faced with this paradox, many governments have been experimenting with new organizational and administrative approaches using instrumental concepts of efficiency and productivity to improve performance and reduce costs.  Latin America is no exception, as evidenced by the interminable administrative, and sometimes constitutional, reforms promoted by various public administration sectors over the past decade. We can observe, in general, that these reforms seek to reduce costs more in response to external impositions than to increase the efficiency of local institutions and enhance their benefits for citizens. At the domestic level, government cost reduction initiatives frequently lead to cuts in social benefits and reduced buying power among public and private sector workers.  In other words, the people are paying the price of an economic policy that benefits diffuse, and concentrating, multinational interests.

Returning specifically to administration, a number of administrative reform initiatives currently are taking place internationally, led primarily by the United States and Europe.4 These reforms emphasize strategic planning, privatization, decentralization, the mass adoption of information and communications technology, performance evaluation, total quality, and the implementation of so-called “best practices,” at lower costs, in public administration.  This is, therefore, yet another attempt to transplant business administration practices to the public sector.  Here it is worthwhile to recall that we already saw this movie in the mid-twentieth century, and it did not have a happy ending.

It is important to understand the main tenets underlying the global discourse that advocates these kinds of public administration policies and experiences, and that intergovernmental technical assistance organizations and international financial institutions are adopting and exporting en masse. The international movement for public administration reform, conceived in international power centers in response to a competitive, globalized world, is transferred naturally to other thematic areas of administration, including education.  It is important, therefore, to understand the ideological substratum and the broader political and intellectual conceptual framework of the global discourse that informs teaching and educational administration practice in our universities and research and development institutions. 

Power relations and the accumulation of material wealth are core elements of the new organizational and administrative approaches comprising a global discourse that endorses essentially competitive tactics.  When such competitive tactics are employed, administrative decisions largely revolve around pragmatic objectives and immediate outcomes, regardless of their ethical value and their cultural relevance. The focus is on increased productivity and cost effectiveness in the provision of services, regardless of their meaningfulness for citizens.  The main concern in this global discourse is not the administrative process or administration per se; on the contrary, administration is merely one aspect of a global strategy. The main concern is with governance, that is, the capacity to mediate strategically in complicated and delicate power relations, particularly government and business relations with civil society and with the social institutions that make up modern life. Since all political and business activity today has countless economic and commercial repercussions at the multinational level, governance in the domestic life of Latin American countries is inserted into the broader context of conflicting economic and political interests at the international level.

By way of conclusion:
A greater challenge for educators

This description leaves us with an extremely complex panorama for actors involved in the social arena, particularly in education and educational management in the public and private sectors, including civil society organizations and community groups. The new global discourse in education and the social sciences endorses concepts and practices that tend to value efficiency and productivity over the actual educational process taking place in a local school or classroom.  Concepts and practices that assign more importance to mastery of competitive tactics than to education for solidarity and collective human coexistence. Concepts and practices that stress patronage nd consumerist behaviors to the detriment of education for citizenship and social accountability. Concepts and practices that assign priority to management control instruments that promote and reinforce decision-making processes concerned with immediate and utilitarian outcomes. Concepts and practices in educational evaluation based on an economic logic that rewards those who have the most and punishes the neediest, thereby frequently becoming a factor in increasing inequality and social exclusion.  It is easy to conclude that such concepts and evaluation practices do not educate for equity, solidarity, a community spirit, and the quality of collective human life, which are widely recognized as the ethical foundations of a sustainable social development policy. 

The correct equation for these circumstances presents an enormous intellectual and praxiological challenge for social actors involved in the education process, particularly teachers, students, parents, and community representatives.  We collectively face the urgent challenge of critically examining new theoretical constructs, analytical categories, and practical solutions in the area of educational policy and administration, which are often conceived and disseminated through multilateral mechanisms of political concertation and international financing, while lacking the participation of social actors working in our schools, universities, and research and development centers.

It should be noted that the stated objective of the authors of the economic logic underlying this global discourse is to achieve high levels of human development so as to be able to compete efficiently in the new society of knowledge.  Nonetheless, a critical and contextual examination of the new conceptual and analytical categories shaping the global discourse frequently reveals that what we are seeing, in fact, are revised versions of the economic theories of human capital, investment in human beings, human resource planning, and administration for development that captivated academics in the education field during the 1950s and the 1960s, only to run out of steam in the 1970s. In other words, a resurgence of powerful neoliberal ideas whose competitive logic is cemented by globalization’s economy of concentration, together with the mechanical use of information technology, is shaping the production and use of knowledge which, for this very reason, has lost much of its traditional critical dimension.5   Knowledge has become a tool of pragmatic and utilitarian objectives that are frequently devoid of ethical validity and political and cultural relevance for our local communities.

In these circumstances, the political class and intellectual community of Latin America once again are called upon to confront the difficult educational challenges facing us at the start of this new century.  These challenges require a conceptual and analytical restructuring that can inject real meaning into the instrumental criteria of efficiency, productivity, and competition, and subordinate them to the ethical and substantive principles of equity, equal opportunity, solidarity, and human dignity. In other words, efficiency and productivity have a role to play inasmuch as they are used  for the promotion of liberty and equity, solidarity and collective human coexistence.  Overcoming these challenges will depend, in large part, on the collective capacity of educators to build knowledge and develop educational practices that are politically effective for our communities and their schools, that are culturally relevant for actors in the everyday life of the school, and that are socially significant and ethically valid for citizens in general.

In closing, I turn to two eminent Latin Americans, Paulo Freire and Pablo Neruda, for inspiration, when I suggest that our international insertion and our contribution to Latin American and international education is contingent upon our faithfulness to our roots, our aspirations, and our local realities.  This is the path to our contribution to the notion of citizens of the world.  In defining citizen of the world, I turn for inspiration to Paulo Freire, maestro of America and winner of the Andres Bello Inter-American Prize for Education awarded by the Organization of American States (OAS) who said:

Before becoming a citizen of the world, I was and, am, a citizen of Recife, to whence I came from my back yard in the Yellow House neighborhood.  The more rooted I am in my own place, the more possibilities I have to spread out, to internationalize.  No one becomes local by starting out universal.”6

I likewise seek inspiration in Pablo Neruda, the great interpreter from Chile and America’s witness in the world who started out writing Canto General de Chile in order to write Canto General de América, or simply, Canto General. Upon finishing his literary masterpiece, Neruda revealed his loyalty and most profound commitment when he said: “Never have I stopped reading the fatherland, nor turned my eyes from the long territory.”7

Paulo Freire and Pablo Neruda teach us that we must develop our ability to think about our Latin America in the inter-American and international contexts, beginning from within, from the voices silenced by the conquistadores of yesterday and today, silenced by the authors of the global discourse of yesterday and today.  Our ability to think about our Latin America and its education using its cultural roots and local realities as a starting point will dictate, in large part, our future in the world and our ability to contribute in an authentic and relevant way to shaping our collective human destiny.  Not a destiny of material wealth based on an economic logic of competition but rather a dignified destiny based on the ethics of solidarity and collective human coexistence.

References

1. SANDER, B. (1996). Educational Management in Latin America: Construction and Reconstruction of knowledge. Washington, DC: Organization of American Status. This essay also was published in Brazil, with the title Gestão da educação na América Latina: construção e reconstrução do conhecimento, Campinas, SP: Editora Autores Asociados, 1995; and in Argentina, under the title Gestión educativa en América Latina: construcción y reconstrucción del conocimiento, Buenos Aires: Editorial Troquel. 
2. DERRIDA, J. (2002). Faith and knowledge, in Acts of Religion. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 42-101.
3. FREIRE, P. (1977). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Paz e Terra, 4a. edition.
See also FREIRE, P. (1981) Educação como prática da liberdade. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 12a. Edition; and FREIRE, P. (1996) Pedagogía da autonomia: saberes necessários à prática educativa, São Paulo: Paz e Terra.
4. KETTLE, D.F. (2000). The Global Public Management Revolution: A Report on the Transformation of Governance. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution.
5. FRIGOTTO, G. (1955). Educação e a crise do capitalismo real. Petrópolis: Editora Vozes.
6. FREIRE, P. (1995). À sombra desta mangueira. Rio de Janeiro: Vozes, p. 25
7. NERUDA, P. (1988). Antología fundamental. Santiago: Pehuén Editores, p. 25.

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