abr. 28 2018
Education and sustainable development (2): TVET in Latin America
Since UNESCO convened the 3rd International Conference on Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) in 2012, this issue has gained momentum. Interestingly, the conference defined TVET as a system whose components are school programmes, training courses, apprenticeship schemes, scholarships, qualification frameworks, career guidance services, labour market intelligence and governance.
Looking back to the historical debate on TVET, this definition is the cornerstone of a significantly new approach. To the extent that educational planning simply relied on building new vocational schools, in the sixties and seventies the systemic features of TVET were seriously disregarded. Critics quickly noticed that the policy rationale assumed a fallacy, since these schools were not effective at all unless their activity was properly aligned with the education system and the labour market policy. In the eighties, TVET was deleted from the agenda on the grounds that increasing enrolment in primary education yielded higher rates of return. But critics also noticed that this strategy eventually provoked a bottleneck as far as transition to post-primary education was not guaranteed.
Currently, most Latin American countries work hard to build their TVET system. An array of popular initiatives indicates that policy-makers want to sort out many different problems. For instance, in Mexico the Build Yourself programme (ConstruyeT) enhances the socio-emotional capabilities of students so that future graduates get the most out of career guidance. In Brazil, before the present fiscal and economic crisis, the National Technological Programme (PRONATEC) struggled to underpin enrolment wih scholarships at the same time as new regional TVET colleges were created. In a different vein, Chilean governments have strengthened the qualifications framework at the same time as guidance services (Chile Valora).
Thus, a wider curriculum of secondary education, a expansion of school-based courses and the coherence of qualificatinos have become key focuses of reforms that aim at building TVET systems. The point is not only how effective each measure is, but mostly, to what extent these programmes contribute to build a system. The making of these systems is one of the most relevant current changes of education policies in the continent. In 2015, SDG4 highlighted the importance of these changes by requiring governments “by 2030, [to] ensure equal access for all women and men to affordable and quality technical, vocational and tertiary education, including university”.
This statement unveils quite important connections between TVET and other dimensions of sustainable development. The relationships with basic education and “decent work and economic growth” (SDG8) are particularly remarkable. However, so far progress has not been enough as far as these other dimensions are concerned.
On the one hand, statistical indicators capture a number of youth who are not enrolled in lower secondary education. Since perfomance is weak in basic education (see quotations from TERCE in the previous post) and a part of each cohort drops out of lower secondary education, it is noticeable that the making of TVET systems will not be sufficient to guarantee the right to education to all. In fact, the first figure below shows how net enrolment in lower secondary education has stalled despite a previous positive trend.
On the other hand, despite educational expansion during the recent decades, youth unemployment has not significantly decreased in Latin America. In contrast with the widespread causal belief in mechanical correlations between education and economic returns, it is noticeable that the trend of youth unemployment does not follow the expected pattern. A complex set of processes contributes to this fact, not least the complex “classification struggles” that sociologist Pierre Bourdieu analysed. The status of young people as students, workers or something in-between is a continuous bone of contention. In short, the second figure below records a stable trend of this indicator.
ssssss