‘The school, whose place is this’? The deep structures of the hidden curriculum in indigenous education in Bolivia

Abstract

In this paper we examine state and indigenous education in Bolivia. Focusing on debates about the hidden curriculum, we conceptualize the school as a political space where tensions between the overlapping jurisdictional powers of the hispanicizing state and indigenous authorities are played out. Our analysis of these tensions highlights the contested way in which indigenous educational policy is negotiated in Bolivia and points to the importance of the deep structures of the hidden curriculum in constructing the school as a territorial authority and a site of struggle in indigenous communities. Using the communities of Raqaypampa, Cochabamba as a case study, we show how local struggles over indigenous education in the 1980s and 1990s became scaled up to influence national educational policy and donor intervention strategies in Bolivia.

Notes

1. Criollo: the Creole Spanish descendents.

2. Pablo Regalsky was the founding member of CENDA (Centro de Comunicación y Desarrollo Andino) formed in 1985 and served as the director from 1985 to 1996. He is currently a member of the board of directors.

3. In the majority of cases Pablo Regalsky attended meetings and interviews cited here.

4. Luis Enrique Lopez, member of the ETARE team, Personal Communication, 1996.

5. This refers to Smith’s definition of ethnicity, as the politicization of cultural difference (Smith, 1986).

6. The Popular Participation law was a set of decentralization policies that recognized the authority of a range of local actors including neighbourhood committees, peasant and indigenous organizations, among others.

7. For more details on this movement see Choque (1986) and Arias (1994).

8. Such processes of appropriating the strengths of the ‘other’ in the demand for schools are not unique to highland Bolivian indigenous communities. See also Aikman (1999) for a discussion of the role of schools in teaching Spanish for the Arakmbut (an Amazonian group in the South of Peru) as part of avoiding the stigma of being labelled ‘ignorant’ and uncivilized’ when entering into commercial ventures in the context of the local gold mining industry.

9. Arnold and Yapita (2000, p. 140) refer to Gose (1994), Harvey (1997), Howard‐Malverde (1995) and Luykx (1999) as in that position.

10. See Laurie et al. (2003) for a broader discussion of contemporary indigenous professionalization processes.

11. This was a teaching of individual teachers to children we heard in three different schools observed by CENDA’s education team in Raqaypampa. The particular quotation was made by Moises Torres, now a leader in the community Independencia, remembering what his teachers had said to him when he was at school.

12. Author’s observation at an open public meeting in Mizque, June 1994.

13. For example, a case documented by CENDA in Morochata province observed how a boy was hung head down by a rope attached to his feet until his death and non‐compliant students were tormented in a ‘cepo’ (bilboes) [medieval stocks attached around the neck and hands].

14. Quotation from Florencio Alarcon, president of CENAQ (Consejo Educativo de la Nación Quechua: Educational Council of the Quechua Nation).

15. Author’s observation at a meeting organized by CENAQ in Sucre 1996.

16. The Boliviano (Bs) is the currency adopted in 1985. Mejia calculated the budget amount at 1980s value.

17. ‘The Raqaypampa agrarian sindicato’s assembly on 15 March 1987, chaired by Victoriano Salazar and Pedro Sandoval, decides to take control of the school. Lucio Pardo, Demetrio Alacrón, Armando Salazar and Julio Salazar are elected as teachers. Acknowledgement of their work was also debated: the parents will work one day each for the benefit of their peasant teachers’. (Field report, CENDA, March/April 1987).

18. CENDA archive, transcription from Quechua, my translation.

19. One of the oldest nationalist local party leaders in Aiquile, with wide experience in dealing with peasant organizations. His son is a merchant and with his truck goes weekly to Raqaypampa and other local peasant marketplaces as ‘rescatiri’ to buy the peasant production.

20. In 1989 the PEIB, a pilot bilingual project, was established jointly by UNICEF and the Education Minister in 12 of the 1500 nuclear schools distributed throughout the Aymara, Quechua and Guarani regions. The experience was taken as a demonstrative basis for the design of the comprehensive Educational Reform through the team known as ETARE established in 1990 in the Coordination and Planning Ministry.

21. Jacinto Albarracín, at a meeting of the Community Education Council and school committees, Raqaypampa, March 1994.

22. The mission of teachers from now on will be: ‘to widen the useful knowledge… now they will interpret, “read” what children know and do, awakening their curiosity’ and so ‘the school can contribute to the valorization and maintenance of orality, centring in the cultural vision expressed by the oral language’ (Ministerio de Desarrollo Humano, 1995, p. 19). Furthermore: ‘Primary school will assume the symbolic codes of the students aboriginal culture’ (art.11° inc.4.)

23. For example the VII Congreso Departamental of Cochabamba FSUTCC (Mizque, January 1995) in Conosur año 13: n°1; 1996; the National Education Congress of the CSUTCB (Cochabamba, October 1996).