As someone who has followed international education for decades, I’ve seen that few issues generate more consensus than the belief that education is crucial for development. No country has achieved significant economic, social and political progress without expanding and improving the quality of its education and learning systems. Achieving learning for all, essential to a wide range of individual and development goals, fundamentally depends upon the quality of education and quality ultimately depends on whether people incorporate useful knowledge, reasoning ability, skills and values to their lives.

It also depends on whether societies can ensure all learners the necessary support needed to participate and benefit from education and learning. Better education and better schools encourage social and economic development and offer better opportunities, better employment and better lives, facilitating a flexible workforce, able to learn on the job and capable of making informed decisions. Last but not least, education prepares citizens for responsible participation and may contribute to poverty reduction, promoting better chances for all.

“Chiquy Boom” by San José Public Library is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Up until now, Latin American and Caribbean countries have significantly expanded school enrollments, mainly at pre-school and primary levels. However low-income countries as a group are still far from reaching the education development goals. For too many students, more schooling has not resulted in greater learning. Poverty remains a barrier to school attendance and learning, particularly for rural populations and minority groups. Inequalities among and inside countries continue to persist and gaps in learning achievements continue to prevail. Few students acquire the problem-solving, critical thinking, and decision-making skills that are critical to success. Teachers are not prepared to provide quality education and equal learning outcomes for all. Effective schools are seldom recognized and rewarded, and recruitment policies to attract best candidates to the teaching profession have rarely been adopted.

Furthermore, large performance gaps among developing countries and the developed world are evident when measured through test scores, particularly among countries that participate in international testing services and are willing to compare on global bases. Global commitments such as Education for All (EFA) and the Millennium and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) remain a key, yet unfinished agenda, requiring strengthened efforts in order to focus on capacity building for learning acquisition, enhance innovative learning environments and apply improved systems to assess learning achievements as a means to improve school performance and success.

2020 will remain in our memory as the year in which a global health crisis taught us that, however substantial, efforts made to improve educational services targeting the poor and vulnerable and decentralizing programs to more accountable local governments, have had limited impact. That current development trends, as well as social and education policies, have been unable to bring down poverty and inequality over past decades.  Several key findings from applied and basic research inform such an approach to teaching and learning.

• Early childhood care, malnutrition, disease, abuse and neglect have consequences for physical and cognitive development and hinders capacity to learn. Investments in the nutritional and health status of children and youngsters, as well as the quality of their interaction with parents, determine the readiness to learn and are valuable for people to function well at home, in their communities and, later, at work,
• Youth who drop out of the school system are vulnerable to unemployment, poverty, teen marriage, pregnancy and delinquency. The challenge is to give these young people non-formal opportunities to consolidate and upgrade basic knowledge reading, writing and arithmetic skills and equip them with technical and vocational opportunities that promote employment and entrepreneurship,
• While governments have a mandate to offer quality education for all, from preschool to higher education, learning opportunities are also offered by non-state groups and organizations. Beyond formal schooling there is a wide range of parties that participate in the provision, financing, regulation and use of learning services. In such a non-formal system, important decisions that affect learning outcomes are influenced by different stakeholders. Building on the experience and skills of students and trainees, their families, employers, training institutes, private and non-formal learning programs, together with the teaching staff, may prove to be positive potential forces for the improvement of the education system as a whole aligning its governance, management, financing and performance incentives mechanisms to produce better learning outcomes for all.

Public education, which largely serve the poor, continues to suffer from low quality in almost every country and fails to promote adequate social progress. Furthermore, policies for teacher recruitment, training, placement, adequate payment of and support for teachers have shown to be highly theoretical and largely disconnected from practical challenges teachers face in the classroom. Follow-up measures and evaluations, beyond periodic classroom observations conducted by peers, principals or supervisors, are not used to verify whether teachers are applying what they have learned or receive regular support, assessment and feedback from master teachers on how to improve their performance.

In most countries of the region, teachers receive the same pay and recognition, regardless of their effectiveness. Salaries are based on seniority and training. Few countries evaluate teacher performance. Virtually no teacher has been dismissed for poor performance. Because more experienced teachers have more to say over where they are assigned, they tend to choose schools with better working conditions. Poor children, who need good teachers, are least likely to get them. People from war-torn zones, rural communities, ethnic minorities, migrant populations and women and girls still face difficulties accessing education. There are still large numbers of out-of-school children. Despite considerable progress in improving literacy, some countries in the region still have large number of illiterate people. Particularly in less developed countries, most assessments conclude that serious problems exist and fundamental changes are needed in order to achieve a single goal: effective teaching in safe and secure learning environments.

Post-pandemic, it is urgent to find inclusive and equitable strategies for reducing poverty and inequality and bringing the poorest citizens into the economic and political mainstream will continue to be a challenge. Social policies, including education, will need to be significantly strengthened in order to contribute to sustainable development. Evidence collected during the peak of the pandemic indicates that school principals and teacher clusters, both at public and private schools, will continue to have a heavy burden when trying to introduce innovations to improve student learning outcomes and put teaching practices on place. New forms or organizational arrangements at school level will be needed. Managerial, analytical and technological capacities improved in order to eliminate the school isolation and develop a new professionalism with tangible benefits for both the educational institutions and for teachers as individuals.

Information and communication technologies have developed very rapidly during the past decades and are now an integral part of our daily lives.  While access to a computer at home has become almost universal, particularly in urban areas, many questions may be raised about the use made of this technology at schools and teachers preparation to prepare students with the skills needed to take advantage of the opportunities that ICT offer.  Teachers and schools were not prepared to face the rise of online courses nor the educational authorities prepared to impose quality control and oversee quality assurance. Neither were they equipped to influence teaching methods and personal approaches to remote students. Many of them, without access to computers or internet, used their own mobile phones or portable devices to connect with their teachers. But it is too early to know how this affect conventional notions of curriculum, assessments and examinations.

Post-pandemic reconstruction offer the schools a unique opportunity of introduce changes in the educational systems and adopt innovative education strategies built on the premise that people learn throughout their lives not simply during the years spent in schooling. The extent to which children, young and adult people learn depends on their motivation and ability to learn, the availability of safe and secure learning environments and the quality of learning opportunities. Several questions have been already raised on these issues. For example, what place do mobile phones have in the classroom and beyond in the near future? What are the benefits and costs of students learning through remote devices? How can teachers and educators develop their students’ critical capacity to use available information? Will the way in which teachers and students store and retrieve information influence the way we teach in the classrooms?

Overall support and past and recent educational strategies and policies for children, parents and local communities should be revisited to unlock the potential of technological resources for all and improve learning outcomes. Post-pandemic education systems in the near future should be reorganized and new strategies built to train learners to be innovative, able to adapt to and assimilate change and able to continue learning. Both young people and adults will require a new set of skills to be competent in a connected and constantly changing world which include critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, communication, and technology literacy. Moreover, future education policies and strategies will have to go beyond academic achievements and cognitive skills to include non-cognitive skills and competencies, as well as education for social cohesion, creativity, and social and emotional development. These challenges will require taking advantage of global trends using a networked, inclusive approach to learning, knowledge creation and mobilization. Moreover, digital literacy programs, home office and flex spaces, hybrid approaches to teaching and learning, social distance and touchless contact are concepts that, from now onwards, will need to be incorporated in our daily lives from both in and out of schools and the education systems.

As recognized by almost every teacher and school principal, educational systems in Latin America are far from being prepared to face post-pandemic challenges such as these.

Children in a náhuatl class drawing parts of the body. Photo by Elizabeth Martinez Buenabad

In most countries, schools fail to provide children—particularly vulnerable children—with the skills they need for their individual development and active citizenship. Despite substantial increases in government spending, and major growth in enrollments, most countries have made very little progress in improving learning outcomes and reducing regional and national education gaps.  Latin America scores near the bottom in every global test of student achievement. This is particularly the case in Central America. The only Central American country to participate in the OECD’s 2009 PISA exam, Panama, scored next-to-last among 74 countries in math, and fourth-from-last in reading. The bottom four performers in the 2006 SERCE exam, which included only Latin American countries, were all from Central America and the Caribbean (Nicaragua, Panama and Guatemala, as well as the Dominican Republic). The poorest 20 percent of students in Honduras are at least ten times less likely to complete upper secondary school than the richest 20 percent. These failings leave children with little prospect of success in modern societies and the labor markets. They hinder scientific and technological development, reduce economic growth, reinforce class and income differences, weaken public institutions and slow the development of democracy.

2021 will not bring us back to normality as we knew it before this crisis. Most probably, schools will never function again as they did in the past—neither private schools nor, even less, the public schools for underprivileged communities. Regulations concerning social distance and security measures will reduce the spaces for socialization and conviviality. Students will have to get used to wearing masks in their classrooms and being taught by teachers who cover their bodies from head to toe. We will have to learn to combine school attendance with so-called hybrid lessons, which combine digital or remote communications among teachers and students. Parents will have to share responsibilities with the school and the teaching communities. School principals will have to learn on how to profit from best practices in good governance and effective use of financial and human resources. Nonetheless, new educational strategies may emerge from this crisis building a high-quality knowledge base to underpin educational change. Policies and practices for educational change will have to be informed by the wealth of research on learning and learners.

The time has come for education to be understood at individual, group, and organizational, societal as well as cultural levels and cover both cognitive and affective domains of learning.  Thus, inquiry-based approaches to organizing learning will be, in the years to come, the most prominent focus in learning sciences and pedagogical research. The following have been identified as the first and foremost priorities to restore learning as the core business of education:

• Pedagogical leadership, vis-à-vis traditional notions of school leadership and conventional administration
• Learning environments, as different from mere provision of funding and resources
• Professionalization of teaching, both in regards to teachers and teaching shared with all stakeholders in society
• Learning assessments, which point to the essential element of monitoring and assessing genuine learning outcomes
• Learning technologies, to make sure they help liberate students as autonomous learners.

It will take a journey to restore learning as the focus of educational planning and decision-making. A journey to accept that schools and educational organizations will become smaller, flatter and looser. Time to accept that, in the years to come, learning to learn will become a major activity in education. Patience and tolerance will be needed to accept short-term hiccups for the sake of the wellbeing of future generations. That is my genuine hope and aspiration.