A historical analysis of the educational modalities of inequalities management in Costa Rica, Cuba and Guatemala

Abstract

This article provides a historical and comparative study of the role that management of inequalities has played in the formation and evolution of educational institutions in three countries: Costa Rica, Cuba and Guatemala. This particular focus shows that this function has played a determining role, even if its organization has varied deeply in time and space. Thus, three important phases are identified, depicted by different educational modalities of management of inequalities: the liberal period, the period of extended management of inequalities, and the neo‐liberal period. Yet, compared with the relative synchrony of these changes, evolutions of the relation between education and inequalities show sharp contrasts. This divergence can be explained by taking into account the interrelations between educational institutions, economic structures and behaviours of the actors.

Notes

* Matisse, University of Paris I—Panthéon Sorbonne, France. Email: eric.mulot@univ‐paris1.fr

Thus this conception of education is akin to Claude Diebolt's point of view, according to which ‘the educational system constitutes a particular form of system, more finalised and more conscious than the others’ (Diebolt, 2000, p. 15).

This logic of complementarity implies that colonies cannot produce goods, agricultural or manufactured, competing with the metropolis. It is most clearly explained by the Spanish economist Joseph del Campillo y Cosio (1971, pp. 118–148).

See the writings of José Cecilio del Valle (1980, pp. 49–53); Pedro Molina, quoted in González Orellana, 1997, pp. 219–222; Justo Rufino Barrios, quoted in Laguardia, 1977, p. 68; Francisco María Oreamuno, quoted in González Flores, 1961, pp. 28, 32, 64 and 65; Francisco Osejo, quoted in González Flores, 1945, p. 77, etc. They are major figures in Central American liberalism.

The compulsory character of primary education appears in the constitution of Guatemala in 1825; of Costa Rica in 1825. The free character of education is stipulated in the constitution in 1835 in Guatemala and in 1869 in Costa Rica. In Cuba, free and compulsory public education was decreed in 1869.

This characteristic of liberal education also prevailed in Europe. See for example Taylor, 1945, pp. 92–93, who describes the ‘upper‐class liberal education’, in which access to the secondary and superior levels of education are reserved for a minority.

This argument is particularly evoked in Cuba and Guatemala about the slaves and the Mayas respectively. See for example texts compiled by Laguardia, 1977, p. 220 for Guatemala and Bachiller y Morales, 1965, p. 212 for Cuba.

The importance of this notion of social property in Europe has been underlined by Robert Castel (1995, Chapter 6, pp. 430–518). We find in the constitutions of the three countries the term ‘social property’ or ‘social function of private property’ in the Costa Rican and Guatemalan cases (Mulot, 2002a, pp. 201–204), and of ‘socialised property’ in Cuba (Le Riverend, 1972, p. 259).

For a detailed description of these measures, see Mulot, 2002a, pp. 204–210.

In Cuba, education represents a major theme of the explicitly Marxist project of emancipation of the labouring classes by transformation of the production relations, inculcating new behaviour, preventing the alienation of the workers, limiting the specialization of work at the origin of the separation between manual and intellectual labour, and allowing the application of the ‘correspondence principle’ between relations established within the education and socialist relations of production (Bowles, 1972, p. 279). These objectives will eventually allow the creation of conditions to decrease inequalities and to tend towards equality of conditions, not only equality of rights.

It is this reasoning which is used by the vast majority of the multilateral institutions working in Latin America (the World Bank, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, the United Nations Development Programme, etc.) to justify the increasing interventions of associations providing educational services.

It is however necessary to note that severe problems also remain: blatant local inequalities appear between villages which receive a plethora of help from associations and others, sometimes situated a few kilometres away, which receive nothing.

This definition is similar to the one proposed by Paul David: ‘A path‐dependent sequence of economic changes is one of which important influences upon the eventual outcome can be exerted by temporally remote events, including happenings dominated by chance elements rather than systematic forces’ (David, 1985, p. 332).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eric Mulot *

* Matisse, University of Paris I—Panthéon Sorbonne, France. Email: eric.mulot@univ‐paris1.fr