By Roger Hamilton

Against the backdrop of a colonial church in Jesús de Machaqa, Bolivia, community leaders carry on the ancient Andean tradition of local government

In the back of the room sat the women, their peaked black headdresses recalling images from a medieval tapestry. They all faced the head table, which stood beneath a portrait of Simón Bolívar and the official seal of the republic.

The first speaker stood up:

“Brothers and sisters,” he began in the traditional way. “We are losing our youths. They are leaving Machaqa to study in the city. We need training centers here, but they must be good quality, with international standards.”

Another took the floor: “We must be careful when we deal with nongovernmental organizations,” he said. “We need their technical help, but we must make the decisions.”

They spoke in Aymara, the language of more than 1.6 million people in the country’s highlands. Their words were translated into Spanish for a visitor by their honored guest, Víctor Hugo Cárdenas, former Bolivian vice president and president of the idb-supported Indigenous Peoples Fund.

A woman got up and reminded the audience that female members of the community are starting to form their own organizations to work on education. They need a place to meet, she said. Another speaker wanted to know why their municipal government didn’t provide more money for projects in their village.

As the meeting went on, the people passed around a black plastic flask molded in the shape of a pre-Columbian effigy. Each shook a few drops of the harsh liquor on the floor as an offering before taking a sip.

Reform in action. This was a meeting of the Education Commission of the Cabildo de Autoridades, or town council. Decision making at the local level is a venerable Andean tradition, and leadership is considered an honor and an obligation. Now this tradition has been enlisted to carry out the far-reaching educational reform that Bolivia launched in 1994.

Bolivia’s new thrust in education is addressing serious deficiencies that threaten the country’s ability to improve the lives of its citizens. In Jesús de Machaqa, Education Commission President Natalio Triguero put it this way: Without better schools, Machaqa cannot develop economically, and its young people will continue to leave to look for opportunities elsewhere.

While poor-quality education is a major problem throughout Latin America, it is particularly serious in Bolivia, South America’s poorest nation. More than half of all Bolivians are functionally illiterate and the average level of schooling is a mere four years. In designing the reform program, policymakers decided that low spending was not the only reason, or even the main reason, for the country’s dismal performance. Equally important was the way educational decisions were made and carried out: beneficiaries were not consulted, management was weak, and for the vast majority of the population, the curriculum, textbooks, teachers, even the language used in the schools were largely alien to their communities and their lives.

The goal of the reform program was to turn education, long the Achilles’ heel of the country’s economy, into its driving force. With the help of $81.4 million in idb financing, the country would streamline the way its educational system is administered, train administrative and teaching staff, develop a new curriculum and give communities a major role in deciding how the reforms would be carried out at the local level.

The most innovative feature of the reform was its recognition of the country’s ethnic diversity. It created special programs to train teachers in bilingual instruction and how to make lesson plans relevant to the local culture. Texts and other teaching materials used examples and illustrations from rural life. Many texts were published in native languages and illustrated with scenes from indigenous culture.

In Jesús de Machaqa and throughout the country, the effects of the reform can be heard in the voices of the children. From a rural schoolhouse one can catch the familiar cadence of students reciting in unison. But drawing closer, it turns out that the words are not Spanish, but Aymara or Quechua. This is a profound change, since in Bolivia, as in most of the other countries of the hemisphere, indigenous languages had long been excluded from the classrooms as a way of assimilating native people into the national culture. In many cases, children would be punished for even speaking their language on school grounds.

Battles are still being waged over bilingual education. In the United States, for example, many argue that teaching immigrant children in Spanish will delay their acquisition of English and leave them at a disadvantage when it comes time to enter the job market. But in Bolivia’s Altiplano, the Aymara language has been spoken since long before history was recorded. It is the native language; Spanish is the immigrant.

As a subject for study, Aymara has attracted considerable interest. Even in 1603, a Jesuit scholar recognized the language’s particular flexibility and its ability to express abstract concepts and incorporate neologisms (maybe too much so, since an estimated third of the words of modern Aymara have a Spanish origin). Contemporary experts have described Aymara as a particularly logical language, giving speakers an advantage in learning mathematics. Italian author Umberto Eco, citing recent studies, claims that unlike most languages, which are based on the standard two-valued logic of true or false, Aymara is based on a three-valued logic, a system that can capture subtleties that tax the abilities of other languages.

Bolivia’s other major indigenous language is Quechua, a legacy of the Inca empire. Spanish is widespread throughout the Altiplano, and is dominant in urban areas.

Language and identity. As a favorite national topic, language and bilingual education quickly became the subject of dinnertime conversation at a Catholic-run educational center in the village of Qurpa, a short drive from Jesús de Machaqa. The genial host, Father José Henestrosa, has worked with indigenous communities here in projects ranging from training teachers to curing sausages and hams. Also present were the Indigenous Fund’s Cárdenas and Luz Jiménez, an anthropologist with Qurpa’s Center of Educational Support, an organization that helps local communities implement the country’s educational reform.

According to Jiménez, language lies at the heart of the Aymara’s cultural identity. The native vocabulary is essential to expressing Aymara values, traditions and way of life. Even when speaking in Spanish, the Aymara use the term ayllu when referring to their community, because the word describes a very special set of human and geographic relationships. Minga is not just labor exchange, but a tradition of specific rights and obligations. Chuño is more than preserved potato, but the staff of life.

The Aymara are proud of their language. But for many, pride stops at the schoolhouse door. Parents often want their children educated in Spanish, not in their native tongue. This is wrong, according to Jiménez. Parents who put Spanish first are practicing a form of colonialism, she says. “When Aymara is used at home and Spanish at school, Aymara becomes a second-class language.”

Cárdenas understands the parents’ point of view. “Spanish is prestigious,” he explains. “It is seen as a stepping stone to the official society, a way to move into another world of greater opportunities.” Spanish is the language of cities, of the communications media, of government, modernization, and seemingly the future, he explains. As such, Cárdenas strongly supports the teaching of Spanish, because it expands people’s options. “And if they can learn even another language, so much the better,” he says.

But despite the importance of Spanish, both Jiménez and Cárdenas believe the native language must come first. It makes sense both culturally and pragmatically, they say. In school, a student taught in his own language learns better. “An Aymara child is more alive in his own language,” says Jiménez.

Moreover, the discipline of learning to read and write Aymara improves a child’s ability to learn Spanish, says Cárdenas. According to this former professor of education and language, the Spanish picked up by native Aymara speakers is actually Aymara translated into Spanish; in other words, bad Spanish. “Merely speaking Spanish is not the answer,” he says. “Children must learn to speak good Aymara and good Spanish.”

Teachers in a bilingual classroom must be unusually dedicated and resourceful. They must learn how to teach Aymara grammar and how to read and write the language. Teaching literacy in Aymara gives the language prestige, showing that it is not just for songs and stories from the oral tradition. Teachers must also have an intimate knowledge of the local culture and how to make it a part of daily lessons. They must know, for example, that when an Aymara student refers to his family, he includes all of his relatives, and even domestic animals. “If teachers ignore the children’s vision,” says Jiménez, “they will destroy it.”

In the past, teachers have often been a part of the problem rather than the solution. According to Jiménez, 90 percent of the rural teachers are indigenous, but only 10 percent are proud of it. The result has been a wall between students and teachers, and between the school and the community.

In carrying out the reforms, teachers need help, and not just in the classrooms. They must also learn to deal with communities that now have a good deal to say about what goes on in the classroom. No longer is every detail of curriculum and teaching method determined in the education ministry. It is up to local people to adapt the established curriculum to the local culture as well as to take charge of building and maintaining school facilities.

Under the reform program, the teachers receive help from what is called educational consultants. Each consultant is assigned to a small group of schools. One of his major tasks is to resolve problems involving bilingual education. In some communities made up of both Spanish- and Aymara-speaking families, a parent from an Aymara family may want his children to be taught in Spanish, not in the native language. This kind of decision, which in the past would have been the teacher’s alone to make, now often becomes the subject of a meeting among the consultant, parent and teacher.

While the reforms are based on a new educational philosophy, their keynote is flexibility, not adherence to an ideological formula. “Our big job is to help children remain Aymara while they also become part of the modern world,” says Jiménez. “Accepting the one does not mean rejecting the other.” The Aymara have survived because of their willingness to change. They have adopted elements of Spanish culture and have put their own stamp on it. They have taken European styles of dressing and made them Andean. They have incorporated new crops into their culinary traditions. They took a community named Machaqa, and renamed it Jesús de Machaqa. This is good, says Cárdenas, because “in order to survive, a culture must be like a sponge.”

Cárdenas recognizes full well the problems of meeting the reforms’ ambitious goals—the uncertain budgets, the environment of poverty, the inevitable resistance to change. But when he looks at today’s schools he is struck by the contrast with the school in a tiny community on the shores of Lake Titicaca that he attended as a child, long before the dream of multiethnic and bilingual education was even a glimmer in someone’s imagination. In his school, chairs consisted of several adobe bricks stacked one on top of the other. Desks were made the same way, only the bricks were stacked a little higher.

Today, visiting a rural school, he will survey the furnishings, the teaching materials, the blackboards, the books, and tell the students: “If I had gone to a school like this one, I would have become president of Bolivia instead of just vice president.”