May 11 2013: Hi, everybody! I am from Argentina. The issue here is public vs private education. Privates schools range from the subsidized church or local school to high end elite schools that teach immersion programmes in English (mainly), French, German or Italian. They are all going through endless battles between innovating and following the National Curriculum (it has basic units that have to be covered by every school in the country) and thethere's the piblic schools who are now sort of being politicized by the government and thecjoice of schools texts has historical bias and propaganda.
It's easy to tell that public education has declined steeply in the past twenty years and the result is a whole generation of dropouts who have been cast out of the system further. They come from poor backgrounds, they struggled through their teen years to stay in school and they found out that ir wasn't enough to get them through college or university (state university here is very good and is free). That fact is only adding numbers to the hosts of poor uneducated people we already have in the country.
I am a teacher and I work with high school students in a private school. I teach community service, and arts. My students are great people but the same cannot be said about students all across the country. Salaries are better but high inflation rates and a lot of sindicates working in many different directions, all present a ver tough scenario if you come to re-think education. We are part of the one laptop per child programme.... Only to hear that corruption has taken half of the netbooks and half of the ones that have been actually given out, were sold or misused and are gone from the intended recipients. (Just an anecdote: some schools received the netbooks and they had no plugs where to plug them or internet to access or teachers that COULD use the computer). But as always, educators look on the bright side and keep going on! That's what we do!!
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It's easy to tell that public education has declined steeply in the past twenty years and the result is a whole generation of dropouts who have been cast out of the system further. They come from poor backgrounds, they struggled through their teen years to stay in school and they found out that ir wasn't enough to get them through college or university (state university here is very good and is free). That fact is only adding numbers to the hosts of poor uneducated people we already have in the country.
I am a teacher and I work with high school students in a private school. I teach community service, and arts. My students are great people but the same cannot be said about students all across the country. Salaries are better but high inflation rates and a lot of sindicates working in many different directions, all present a ver tough scenario if you come to re-think education. We are part of the one laptop per child programme.... Only to hear that corruption has taken half of the netbooks and half of the ones that have been actually given out, were sold or misused and are gone from the intended recipients. (Just an anecdote: some schools received the netbooks and they had no plugs where to plug them or internet to access or teachers that COULD use the computer). But as always, educators look on the bright side and keep going on! That's what we do!!