The Politics of Schooling in the Nonliterate Third World: The Case of Highland Peru

Abstract

EVALUATIONS OF BOTH LITERACY and education have tended to focus on their ostensibly revolutionary consequences. Urbanization, industrial growth, the rise of a middle class and a more democratic society, and a world view attuned to the need for and inevitability of change, are classed among the results. (1) No matter which effect is seen as most critical, education and literacy are interpreted primarily in terms of their impact over the mediumto long-term. There is, however, another crucial dimension to the educational dynamic. As with any social process, when education is imposed upon a population, or appropriated by it, a political exchange involving various actors, with varying interests, must come into play. The nature of this process means that the perceived value of education to a particular group may not correspond to the more general consequences and conceptions to which the theorists address themselves. Precisely because it is essentially political, resistance to schools is not necessarily reactionary. Neither is popular demand for instruction an unequivocal indicator of progressive thought or aspirations, The realities are far more complex. The general socioeconomic context within which specific groups evaluate education as a possible response to change (or its lack) plays a major role in shaping their reactions. While more and more investigators are analyzing education and literacy in the Third World, their studies often only reiterate the traditional emphasis on ultimate ends. Education is defined and analyzed in teleological terms: when expected consequences do not occur, analysts can only ask why the school failed. The explanatory burden tends to fall upon the school, while the recognition of group motivations is limited to the observation that successful instruction would have tapped these impulses. Concern for the political dynamic