Bolivia revolutionises bilingual education

Intercultural and Bilingual Education supports the rights of indigenous school children to be taught in their own languages.

What can we learn from Bolivia, with one of the largest indigenous populations in Latin America, where children learn in their mother tongue?

Nearly two-thirds of Bolivians belong to one of 34 indigenous groups, the largest in population being Quechua and Aymara. Until 1982, children were punished at school for speaking their own languages rather than Spanish. As a result indigenous groups have lost many of their cultural and linguistic traditions.

Better quality schooling

Intercultural and Bilingual Education (IBE) in Bolivia aims to teach in at least the three main indigenous languages, Quechua, Aymara and Guaran’. It also aims to develop education and teaching processes in indigenous languages and Spanish.

IBE increases self-esteem and makes children happier, more communicative, participative, imaginative and creative. Since 1994, when the Education Reform Law expanded IBE to another 30 minority language groups, 14 more indigenous alphabets have been standardised and taught in schools.

A comparison of schools following the new IBE curriculum with traditional rural primary schools shows that students taught through IBE repeat an academic year less often (24 percent vs 48 percent). The level of satisfactory educational performance for indigenous children has increased from 19 to 35 percent.

Keeping cultural identity

Placing indigenous languages at the centre of education provides indigenous children with the security and freedom to achieve better results, while maintaining their communities' cultural values and practices. Using the written form of indigenous languages also gives communities a sense of pride and prestige, with important implications for participating in national society.

Evidence shows that

• Experience from neighbouring countries with the same indigenous peoples is important: Bolivian educators trained in Puno, Peru have been key implementers of the reform, which has also received strong support from Peruvian experts.
• Teacher training is crucial: it is more effective to train new teachers than to reform those used to traditional methods. The lack of qualified intercultural and bilingual teachers and the resistance of Spanish-speaking teachers to adopt new practices and teaching materials have been major obstacles.
• UNICEF and other international agencies have been instrumental in helping turn IBE into official policy and in turning this policy into practice.

Further success will require

• better links between the Ministry of Education and those responsible for meeting specific local and regional primary school needs
• more written materials in indigenous languages, including oral literature and translation from Spanish and other languages
• promoting intercultural and bilingual education of the dominant Spanish-speaking group, which is specified by law but not yet happening in practice
• more investment in teacher training to promote understanding and use of bilingual methods and strategies
• strategies to measure intercultural and bilingual equality and creativity as well as the attitudes and values of indigenous groups
• establishing IBE as official state policy through the constitution, so that successive administrations can not dismantle it.

Xavier Albó
CIPCA Bolivia, Casilla 5854, La Paz, Bolivia
www.cipca.org.bo
T +591 2 2432272/6
F +591 2 2432269
xalbo@entelnet.bo

See also

Niños alegres, libres, expresivos: la audacia de la educación intercultual bilingüe en Bolivia (Happy, Free and Expressive Children) by Xavier Albó and Amalia Anaya, UNICEF, 2003
www.unicef.org/bolivia/resources_2245.htm

Views expressed on these pages are not necessarily those of DFID, IDS, id21 or other contributing institutions. Copyright remains with the original authors but (unless stated otherwise) any article may be copied or quoted without restriction, provided both source (id21, insights) and authors are properly acknowledged and informed. Copyright © 2006 id21. All rights reserved.