Blog Número tres
People recognize the need for change in the education systems, if they didn’t there wouldn’t be nearly as much talk to address these issues. Poverty is something that a lot of people are unable to ignore, no matter how hard they try might try. Today we went up to Pamplona Alta, a place that the wealthy Peruvians continually try to forget. Most of Lima lives in shanty towns and communities that are located high up on the hills. This began with an invasion of the area on January 6th, a number of years ago. They “invaded” the land and converted it into makeshift homes, some more finished than others. It was quite shocking to see the living conditions that most people live in every day. They have to drive/ walk/ hitch a ride all the way up to the top of the hill and then when the road stops they have to walk up the stairs. This is their only means of getting to and from their homes, which is an issue for them in many different ways. When there is an emergency like someone is giving birth at 2 in the morning, their husband has to carry them down the plethora of unsafe, steep, concrete steps in the dark. Then they must wait for a taxi to take them in to the city to the nearest hospital because there is only one medical post for over 60,000 people.
Unfortunately, this also means that mundane things become a heavy work load, specifically when it comes to water. People of Pamplona Alta have great big jugs given to them from the municipalities, they are located by their homes to store their water. To fill up one jug of water costs 15 soles and will last a family of 3 or 4 people only a few days. To put this into perspective, Lauren, a woman who lives in Pueblo Libre (near our host stay, a middle class area) has to pay 20 soles a month to have water in her home. Education is also a mess up in Pamplona, there is only one public school up near that area and it fills up quickly. After that, families have to pay to send their children to private schools. Most of these families aren’t able to do that because they don’t have any money to spare after buying food and water, so the kids don’t go to school. There is a Fé y Alegría school in the area but there are so few teachers who want to work there or have the ability to work there that some classrooms are empty. I’m really glad that we read the article, “Extreme Poverty in America” before we came to Pamplona Alta because it helped give me some perspective. This article listed some pretty horrifying statistics that made me ashamed to be pointing my finger anywhere else, one of these being, “By most indicators, the US is one of the world’s wealthiest countries. It spends more on national defense than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United Kingdom, India, France and Japan combined.”. When we walked around I was placing blame and asking myself how the government doesn’t give these people more money, and I had to remind myself where the money in America goes. It’s really humbling, sometimes we need to quiet our judgements and focus on the good instead. People in this are genuinely care about each other, I watched a taxi driver help a woman carry a full gas tank up a very long and steep staircase. They have a community there and its pretty incredible to witness.
There just so happens to be a great big wall, labeled the Wall of Shame that separates Pamplona Alta from a very rich area. The article we read on this wall grouped it with a number of other walls that, “outline physical spaces in a way that controls, excludes and limits access to resources, land and even cultural identity.”. I just wanted to make one that I learned yesterday clear, this wall was created because if they weren’t people would build their homes in other people’s backyards. Some of these people live on private land that belongs to someone else right now. So the reason it was built was to create a border between how far people could push into standing neighborhoods. Even if these are really rich neighborhoods, that isn’t right because the land belongs to someone else. This is why the situation gets sticky, I definitely do not think that this wall limits cultural identity because I saw a lot of artistic expression in the community. I obviously think that it is unfair that one side of the wall has more than they know what to do with and the other side of the wall is struggling to get by, but I haven’t come up with a solution for where these people should go because there simply is not enough space. Within Education there is this perspective of compensatory education, which has the goal of helping students by using inputs of education such as funding, teachers, curriculum, school day length and attempting to equalize the outputs of test scores, graduation rates, life expectancy, earnings, and incarceration rates. The idea makes a lot of sense, but as we talked about in lecture, the Coleman report clearly outlines that the inputs do not equalize the outputs. But this doesn’t mean we should stop trying to work on the inputs because it’s the right thing to do. At the end of the Compensatory Education the author wrote, “To the millions of children that Title I and Head Start have served, though, it has made important differences in their lives, their families’ lives, and in their schools.” The article evaluated how effective the programs Title I and Head Start were in education, while they will never be able to equalize the inputs and outputs, they still made a difference.
So then the question we are left with is, how do we help educate the people of Pamplona Alta? We don’t need to keep up with the compensatory education with the goal of equalization in mind, but we should keep on trying to make life better for the students. In Pamplona Alta, that specifically means more teachers and schools. It made me rethink how I felt about the privatization of education in Peru because even if the people might not be well trained they still are well intentioned. At this point, there are so many children who are out of school up there and its simply an injustice. I personally feel as though the state should make some sort of incentive for the teachers to get them working up in Pamplona Alta. Then again, there are more than enough issues back in America so who am I to make these suggestions in Peru?
