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Time to make
intercultural bilingual
education a priority Indigenous people are carriers of culture, despite a history of attempts to clear them away, annex them, colonize them or control them. This autochthonous culture has educational expressions that have permitted its identity to survive in ever more difficult circumstances. The comarcas and their inhabitants do not escape the problems of the external world, which are a permanentl test for them. The indigenous lands do not have secure boundaries, and are continually invaded by land barons, or by poor campesinos whose pressures for their subsistence emperil the territory and its ecological equilibrium. Now there are many indigenous people who live in the cities, working in the lowest paid jobs when they can find work. They hang their hammocks in certain neighborhoods and in their colorful dress invade those urban arteries marked by poverty and the threat of violence on the street. On their native lands they suffer from the unjust commercialization of their products. The levels of malnutricion and illiteracy are very high. In indigenous areas the classes are always given in Spanish and only half of the indigenous boys and girls understand this language. This makes more attention to intercultural bilingual education urgent for Panama. Many times superficial and expensive tourism which takes no cognizance of the local culture invades and dollarizes the traditional society, in a minimal time deforming it and its forms of relationships. Political structures and electoral circuits are superimposed over the traditional structure, weakening the power of the communal organization and the congresses and also its mutual assistance traditions, such as voluntary cooperation in the building of houses. Political games of patronage, promises and partisan divisions break up the traditional indigenous unity. "Gifts are things that tie our tongues," exclaims one leader. "It's time for us to stop and say, 'No gifts!' Now we can evaluate things for ourselves, giving ourselves the hope of liberation...." In their book "Education and Society in the History of the Kuna Nation," sociologists and educators Miñoso Arias and Guillermo López recount the education of Kuna men and women and make society's teaching institutions as one of the elements in their ethnic educational proposal, which has great sociological and pedagogical value both for the process of affirming indigenous culture and also as part of the inspiration for a proposal for intercultural bilingual education. One accomplishment is the National Plan for Intercultural Bilingual Education (EBI, by its Spanish acronym) that was adopted in August of 2005 and sets down the strategic lines of public policy, includes a proposed law that protects and makes official Panama's indigenous languages, and establishes the linguistic bases for EBI. According to the actors in this process themselves --- the indigenous congresses and their supporters in civil society --- it's necessary to strengthen the Ministry of Education's Indigenous Unit that's responsible for implementing EBI, giving it more resources, technical capacity and the fundamental tools to carry out its work. It's vital to give this process priority, on the basis of adapting the national educational curriculum, the study programs and the teaching resources to each of the indigenous cultures, incorporating the vision and values of each as well as the language itself. This involves the formation, training and full-time functioning of professional technical teams, one for each indigenous group, which include officials from the Ministry of Education, indigenous educators and experts on the different cultures who are chosen by the indigenous authorities themselves. This requires planning and budgetary allocations that are not there today. It's essential to undertake an adult literacy campaign, a commitment made by Panama at the Ibero-American Summit at Salamanca last year, based on the EBI proposals. A budget for educational changes is necessary, in order to help solve teh great problems that beset this country in this important field of human activity. It's necessary, as Adriana Puiggrós says, "to design policies for pedagogical change that respect three characteristics: participation, experimentation and gradualism. Educational reforms are profound processes, that put into motion structural aspects of social and cultural life, that commit the collective imagination and memory both historical and prospective. They aren't possible without a consensus in the educational community and it's necessary to accumulate society's experiences and learn from them. Policies imposed from above without consultation in homogeneous form have shown in numerous countries that they are likely to fail and require authoritarian measures to be carried out. A responsible reform must be respectful of the times and of cultural styles, of specific demands and of the right of the subjects of the educational community to participate in the reform of their education, that of their children and the things to which teachers dedicate themselves."
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