The granting of the 2024 Princess of Asturias Award to the Organization of Ibero-American States for Education, Science and Culture (OEI) occurs at a particularly complex time for the region in three central aspects: the urgent need to improve educational quality as a condition essential to increase the growth and productivity of economies; the need to go beyond commonplaces and canonical recommendations when generating knowledge in a dizzying, turbulent and changing world, and understanding the strategic meaning of international cooperation, for which the OEI has received this award, as cohesion mechanism between diverse countries that, however, are united by common values and interests.
The work that the OEI has developed over more than seven decades has accompanied and promoted the evolution of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Ibero-America in terms that few could have anticipated then. In 1949, the world was emerging from World War II; the bipolar system emerges sustained by two great powers; the People’s Republic of China is born; The initial dialogues begin that two years later would give rise to the European Coal and Steel Community and much later to the European Union; Latin America was just beginning to glimpse its own destiny, in the midst of a varied transition between political, economic and urban architectures that had not just died and others that had not just been born, and had educational systems that, perhaps with the exception of Argentina and Uruguay , they slowly began their construction. That is the fascinating and uncertain year in which the OEI was founded, first as an international agency for Ibero-American Education and shortly after as an intergovernmental organization of multilateral cooperation.
Since then, the OEI has been a promoter, promoter and main protagonist of the educational changes, reforms and transformations that today are in the first place of the challenges of the public agenda of the Ibero-American space, especially that of quality education, equity and inclusion, through the execution of 650 annual projects that have benefited more than 12 million people in the last five years or with the training of 40,000 teachers in the classroom. Its action has covered critical areas both in inequality in access to educational opportunities; school dropouts; the fight against illiteracy and the implementation of educational reforms aimed at quality in learning as in others, more sophisticated or third generation, such as digital transformation, education for productivity, and the promotion and defense of democracy, human rights humans and equality from the perspective of education and citizenship.
Although the challenges are many and the conditions of each country are different, the truth is that in all of them there is an explicit decision to improve education, strengthen scientific development and technological and digital innovation, and strengthen policies and new cultural industries. . At different speeds, Ibero-America has understood that quality education is the best and most lasting investment to reach higher levels of equity and social and economic mobility.
The Ibero-American space is naturally diverse and heterogeneous. But the evidence, much of it gathered or generated by the OEI through its reports, shows increasingly better what practices, policies and interventions are whose adequate implementation can have a very positive impact in the search for the desired results, with relative independence. of national particularities. In other words, as Mariano Jabonero stated, use evidence to construct relevant and effective educational policies.
To reflect on the state of education in our region, data from the OEI itself allows us to observe that, although there are significant advances in primary and lower secondary education, the other major pending issues are in initial, preschool and upper secondary education, as well as the quality and relevance of higher education. Coverage in Initial Education shows slow progress in the region, below 50%, and in preschool education the average in the region is 64%. Regarding terminal efficiency, the regional rate in upper secondary is 61%, in contrast to 94% in primary and 88% in lower secondary. These figures reveal that the efforts of Ibero-American countries should focus on implementing educational policies aimed at ensuring that more adolescents continue and complete their studies.
These are, in short, some examples of the challenges that both Latin America and the OEI face. In other words, move forward to achieve greater quality, mobility, equity and inclusion with a strong commitment from the real society that is made up of men and women, parents, individual and flesh-and-blood citizens. If the great achievement of the 20th century was for universal coverage in basic education, now the great battle of the 21st century is for quality with equity and inclusion.
In this itinerary, multilateral cooperation has been and will continue to be decisive for several reasons. One is that effective cooperation allows us to serve as a communicating vessel of knowledge, practices and innovations between very heterogeneous countries and regions with which real and sustainable solutions are built. It is well known that regional averages hide important differences between states and it is difficult, for example, to make balanced comparisons between, for example, a country the size of Brazil with another the size of Guatemala. Regional asymmetries are a multiple problem that we face every day in order to properly calibrate the nature of some of the educational challenges but also for the design, formulation and execution of more effective public policies to achieve improvements in key learning, to which is centrally contributed by the cooperation of the OEI and other international organizations.
And a second aspect is that, through cooperation, it is possible to provide ideas and instruments to strengthen the energy and quality of public leadership with which educational improvements are implemented, as well as give it a higher level and political weight on an international scale. That is, help remove bottlenecks in the implementation of reforms, overcome weaknesses in management capacity within educational systems and provide legitimacy and sustainability to good policies.
That is precisely the meaning of cooperation: that it happens and affects the real world of countries, communities and people. Quality education aims above all to improve students’ learning and boost their social and economic mobility. And this requires having professional and much more prepared teachers; offer better content; have better and more modern physical spaces, digital resources and relevant teaching materials; teach diversity and respect for those who see and live the world in a different and diverse way.
To form, in short, a genuine citizen of the world who, as Edward Said once said, is “a cluster of flows and currents.”
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