Blog 9// my kids are fine… but what about the rest of the world??

I have learned so much about schooling in Peru, and more than anything I realized how diverse that Peru is as a country in general. Education is pretty political in every country because of the funding that the government does. It is up to the government to decide how money and resources are allocated for the schools. It seemed pretty similar to how things are set up for us, and that’s a shame. The people with money are able to send their children to the schools with money and a cycle is started. This is one of the many reasons that inequality is perpetuated throughout the US as well as in Peru. One thing that is super different between Peru and the US is that there is no separation between church and state. With that being said, even the public schools are connected to the church, celebrate mass, and include the perspective of the church in all of what they are learning. In the US, that’s not the case, obviously. This was really interesting because teachers can set expectations that follow morality based on the definition of the church, something that teachers in the US can only do if they work for a religiously based school. I think it would make more sense if the church used its power to equalize the amount of funding that goes to different schools. That way they would be able to use their influence on the government in a more beneficial way for the children throughout the entire country.

Culturally, schooling was pretty diverse because that is how the country is set up. It is separated into the city, the jungle, and the mountains that all have different traditions, struggles, and even languages. While I don’t know anything about the jungle other than the abundance of insects, I could definitely see the differences between the schools in Lima as well as the schools in the mountains. The students in the mountains had to walk hours to school each day, they spoke Quechua, and their access to technology is limited. A lot of the young girls would have to wait until they were old enough to walk such a long distance safely before they could start attending school. This meant that they would be behind at the time they started. Then they would usually only make it to third grade because they would have responsibilities or families to take care of by super young ages. So they started school super late and then cut out early. The Fe y Alegria school in Andahuaylillas was focused on being intercultural between the Quechua ways as well as the ways of the Westernized Peru. The schools in Lima were much more focused on continuing to Westernize by learning English. The schooling conditions were much easier because these families had the resources to send their children to better funded schools in the city.

Diversity has become a common theme throughout our time in Peru, and it also has a lot to do with the social processes of education. I think it comes down to money once again, because where there is money there is a different mindset for doing the right thing. It becomes “service”, something that you can put on a sheet of paper and make your resume look better. I’m not saying that this is how it is for all of the people with money in the world, but it does play a role in the way that the do what is right. At Roosevelt, things were as I just described. At Inmaculada, a school that was still on the upper middle class side of things, there was more of a need to connect with the students who may have a lower SES. Then, when it moves down to La Casitas or MLK Deportivo and there is a greater sense of responsibility for each other. Doing the right thing is part of what is the most important to them.

I hate that money is always such a constant driving factor in education. It’s something that most educators don’t have enough of to cancel out the negative factors within education. During my time in Peru, I realized that a lot of our issues aren’t so different. If we look from a different perspective, we can find so many similarities because they are all connected to money, inequality, and not being able to reallocate our resources better. Everyone wants to have the best for their children, and they so rarely think about how important it is to share what they have with the rest of the world. We can’t blame the parents for wanting what’s best for their children, but we can blame them for being unable to see that other people deserve to succeed just as much as their children do.