Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0124/01249.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 42KB | 656 lines

$Unique_ID{COW01249}
$Pretitle{350}
$Title{El Salvador
Chapter 2C.   Education}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Mary W. Helms}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{percent
rural
urban
land
salvador
areas
education
government
women
san}
$Date{1988}
$Log{}
Country:     El Salvador
Book:        El Salvador, A Country Study
Author:      Mary W. Helms
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1988

Chapter 2C.   Education

     Public education was a higher priority than health care for government
spending, and statistics reflected this disparity. School attendance and
literacy in general increased notably in El Salvador as a whole during the
twentieth century, particularly during the 1960s, when an ambitious program of
school construction was carried out. Officially, literacy increased from 26.2
percent of the adult population in 1930 to 59.7 percent in 1971. By 1980 only
31 percent of the population aged ten years or older was considered
illiterate.

     The Salvadoran education system included one year of preschool, nine
years of basic education, three years of secondary education, and higher
education at two universities and several specialized postsecondary
institutions. The curriculum at the basic and secondary levels, developed by
the Ministry of Education, was uniform throughout the country. The provision
of education, however, suffered from a rural-urban dichotomy. Countrywide
statistics displayed the weakness of the school system on the secondary level;
in a 1976 study, only 34 percent of students reached grade nine, and 15
percent reached grade twelve.

     In the 1970s, primary-school enrollment increased by 90 percent. The
benefit of such schooling, however, disproportionately favored urban areas,
especially San Salvador, even though the majority of the illiterate population
lived in rural areas. Stated differently, in 1980 about 40 percent of the
rural population over age ten was illiterate, as compared with 25 percent of
the urban dwellers. In the 1970s, fewer than two- thirds of school-age rural
children attended primary schools, as compared with more than 90 percent of
their urban counterparts. About 8 percent of the country's total enrollment in
middle secondary education, grades seven through nine, were rural children; at
the upper secondary level, grades ten through twelve, about 1 percent were
rural children. In addition, illiteracy was twice as prevalent among women as
among men; only about 30 percent of higher education students were female.

     The high degree of rural illiteracy reflected several factors. At the
most basic level, the number of teachers and schools provided for rural areas
was seriously inadequate. In the 1970s, only 15 percent of the nation's
schoolteachers served in rural areas; although 64 percent of primary schools
were in rural areas, only 2 percent of secondary schools were. Existing rural
schools were able to accommodate only 43 percent of the rural school-age
population. Furthermore, of the primary schools available for rural children,
approximately 70 percent offered education only below grade five. By contrast,
90 percent of urban primary schools offered grade five or above. In rural
areas, the 1976 student-to-teacher ratio was sixty to one, as compared with
forty to one in urban areas.

     In addition, there was a high attrition rate in school attendance in
rural areas as students left school to earn incomes or work at home. It is
significant that although school attendance generally began at about the age
of eight or nine, about 70 percent of all male workers began work before the
age of fifteen, many by age ten or earlier, thus permitting only one or two
years of schooling. Many girls also dropped out of school at an early age to
assume domestic responsibilities, such as caring for younger siblings, working
in the fields, or tending animals. Therefore, in 1976 only about 20 percent of
rural school-age children reached grade six, and only 5.7 percent reached
grade nine.

     Efforts to improve this situation in the rural agricultural areas were
somewhat discouraging, in part because of the political tensions of the 1980s.
In some situations, teachers, mainly women, faced threats if they were thought
to be supporters of political change. Furthermore, many rural landowners
seemed to prefer an uneducated rural population, on the grounds that better
educated workers would expect better wages and be more likely to organize and
lobby the government for reform, particularly land reform. A number of
national education plans developed by the Ministry of Education had recognized
the disparity between rural and urban education, but none had succeeded in
bringing rural education up to the urban level.

Migration

     Salvadoran migratory patterns have been shaped by socioeconomic problems
such as insufficient land, limited job opportunities, low wages, and
persistent poverty. Some Salvadorans emigrated permanently from the country,
some moved within the rural area itself, and some moved to urban areas in
search of a better life. Internal and external migration levels were augmented
by the civil conflict of the 1980s, although family and community
fragmentation and dislocation were long-standing characteristics of life for
the lower class. These patterns can be traced to the latter half of the
nineteenth century, when communal landholdings were dissolved to facilitate
the expansion of private holdings. This action created a dispossessed labor
force whose movements came to be dictated by the cycles of coffee production.

     Seasonal migrations from home communities to cash crop estates at times
of harvest have been a way of life for many rural dwellers ever since coffee
production came to dominate the Salvadoran economy (see The Oligarchy and the
Liberal State, ch. 1). This type of migration was particularly important for
land- poor peasants from the relatively infertile northern departments,
hundreds of thousands of whom sought seasonal work in the central coffee
regions. Similarly, as cotton farming developed in the coastal zone, both
permanent laborers and thousands of seasonal harvest workers followed,
particularly to land east of the Rio Lempa and within the Sonsonate coastal
plain in the southwest.

     Between 1945 and 1969, population increase and land loss, particularly to
cotton estates, led as many as 300,000 workers and dispossessed
peasants--about 7 percent of the Salvadoran population--to migrate to
neighboring Honduras. There, as farm laborers, squatters, tenants, or small
farmers, they joined the land-poor rural population or moved to provincial
towns where they were subsumed into the Honduran labor force. By the late
1960s, these Salvadorans constituted 12 percent or more of the Honduran
population, and they had established contacts among that population, which was
involved in its own agrarian reform efforts. The Honduran government targeted
Salvadoran immigrants as the principal impediment to land redistribution
efforts, encouraging anti-Salvadoran sentiments in an attempt to diffuse
tensions among Honduran peasants and agricultural workers. In the wake of the
ensuing Honduran agrarian reform, in which only native Hondurans were allowed
to own land, as many as 130,000 Salvadorans were forced, or chose, to give up
whatever jobs or land they had acquired and return to El Salvador. The exodus
of Salvadorans from Honduras contributed to the so-called "Football War" of
1969 between the two countries, and the large number of returning Salvadorans
worsened social and economic tensions within El Salvador itself.

     In spite of ongoing tension with Honduras, Salvadorans continued to
emigrate to that country, not only as landless laborers seeking work but, in
the early 1980s, as refugees fleeing the civil conflict in El Salvador.
Honduras seemed a logical refuge for many, given its proximity to the
bordering Salvadoran departments of Morazan, Cabanas, and Chalatenango, all
areas suffering under the civil conflict during the early