Notes on the cohesive society

Juan Andrés Díaz, Economics student at Universidad de los Andes.

The TREES Education and Social Cohesion Special was reported by Angie Bautista, Gabriel Barrero, Jefferson Hernández, Juan Andrés Díaz, Julieta Espinosa, María Camila Lozano and Sergio Díaz. This essay is a commentary on the reporting of the special.

I have always thought that the skeleton of the economy appears in everyday places. It is enough to look a little closer to realize the laws of the market that govern them. However, within the elegance of economic language and models, there is something that pushes questions about big words like democracy, society, good and evil. And it is issues like, in this case, education, that have that everyday yet tenacious nature. Ever since I was in high school, I've been uneasy about the idea of “living in a bubble” and education being a privilege.

This special on Education and social cohesion nurtured and shaped this concern. We reconstructed what should be the three main axes of the educational system in Colombia: coverage, quality and cohesion. We explored the absence of the last one and the relationship between educational segregation and inequality. We were able to achieve this thanks to the voices of teachers, public servants, businessmen, writers and students. And although economic discussions were the protagonists, with each conversation we understood that the key to the educational problem in Colombia goes beyond the material relations of economists.

The existence of educational segregation, or, as the editors of The fifth door, the educational apartheid, is very present in the consciousness of students. It is the elephant in the room during most of our social interactions. The observations of Leopoldo Fergusson, Juan Camilo Cardenas and Mauricio Garcia Villegas are accurate in describing our behavior. We can ask any student at Andes and they will provide a casual, but well-detailed ethnography of the “cliques” that are around. Our parents' decision to put us in a public or private school established different cultures and frameworks of thought in which we all swim. The educational apartheid is an undeniable reality, so we wanted to go out and portray it. We went to public and private universities with three billboards. On the first one, people had to write the two last names of their best friends from school; on the second one, they placed their school on a map of Bogota with a sticker; and on the third one, they wrote three words with which they associated their school experience.

Without digging too deep, the results of the three billboards mirrored the educational apartheid. The responses of the interviewees confirmed the hypothesis that there is separation and inequality in the reception of a service and that this has important social consequences. In the first billboard we found that, despite the fact that there are many surnames transversal to the population, there is a set of surnames exclusive to private school students. The results of this sample seem to be consistent with the research. The persistence of segregation in education: Evidence from historical elites and ethnic surnames in Colombia by Andrés Álvarez, professor at the School of Economics of the Universidad de los Andes, and Juliana Jaramillo Echeverri, researcher at Banco de la República.

In the second billboard, a clear spatial segregation between public and private school alumni appeared. Finally, in the third billboard, we saw how the language changed when describing the school experience. Even though words such as “happiness” or “friends” appeared in both groups, others such as “farras” or “IB” were only in the group of alumni from private schools. When we showed the results to Professor Andrés Álvarez, he could not help but laugh nervously because the surnames were so parodic of Bogota's elites. That captured the conclusion of his working paperThe educational system in Colombia reproduces patterns of exclusion that are rooted in the past, which hinders the role of education as an engine of social mobility. The video of this activation is on TREES social networks, go check it out..

«When we have an educationally segregated society, we also have a socially segregated society. That is, it's not just that we go to different schools, it's that we will never get married, we will never be friends, we will never live in the same building. Our trajectories are fragmented,» said María José Álvarez, professor of Sociology at the Universidad de los Andes, synthesizing very well what we found with the billboards. Questioning where this fragmentation comes from, Mauricio García Villegas told us that (for a change) it originates from a big disagreement between conservatives and liberals. Both parties failed to establish a public education system, as they did not accept each other's positions on who should be responsible for education: the State or the Church. 

After establishing that root cause, Mauricio spoke in more detail about the immediate cause of the problem in the education system, which he and his co-authors of The fifth doorThe trap of the weakness of public goods. This consists in the fact that, faced with a low supply of a quality public good, people with higher incomes privatize that good, which leads to its low demand and consequently, once again, to its low supply.

It was in the billboard activity that I realized that public goods are the economic skeleton of the education problem. Things felt different depending on whether we were in public goods or private goods territory. People started talking about what they saw on the billboards. I remember, at a private university, a student saw the map of Bogotá and the first thing he said was «Ush, is that Bogotá?» with astonishment and a bit of embarrassment, as if he had never before sized up the city beyond the limits he knew. I think it's not so much his fault, again, educational segregation is a reality that seems inescapable. And it is impressive to think that the student's comment is indirectly caused by a republican dispute that was distracted by education, and in whose consequences we now live absorbed.

«People talk about the fact that public policies in Colombia have focused a lot on coverage, that may be true, but before there were no children in schools, how am I going to start making quality if I have no one to educate?» said Isabel Segovia, Secretary of Education of Bogota, when we began to explore the impact and limitations of public policy in education. To evaluate public policies, says Isabel, it is necessary to think about the life of countries. Although 25 or 50 years is a long time for a human being, it is not for a nation.

Since the 91 Constitution and the General Education Law, Colombia has taken enormous steps forward. In the early 2000s, the system began to organize itself with a deployment of infrastructure, teachers, financing and pedagogical models. «The public education system we have today, the one with the deficiencies it has, but which effectively has educational institutions, teachers, material, children enrolled in schools and a number of other things, has only existed for 25 years.».  

Now, Isabel explains that the quality challenge has an important characteristic, the marginal decision of parents: «As long as public schools are not competitive, a family with resources is not going to think about putting their child in a public school versus being able to pay for a private school and have them leave with the guarantees of coexistence and quality required to face life». This confirmed something that may seem obvious, but that we should not forget: coverage, quality and cohesion are deeply related and always lead to each other.

Regarding Bogotá's current efforts, Isabel mentioned the three programs that this mayor's office is implementing: Closing Gaps, Complete Educational Trajectories and School with Emotions. The first seeks to improve quality, with emphasis on reading, math and science skills. The second addresses school dropout, making education more connected to students' life projects. And the third creates safe school environments, addressing the problems of coexistence that worsened after the pandemic. This conversation allowed us to understand that there have been significant advances in coverage and that, by achieving optimal quality conditions, it is possible for education to take the first step towards cohesion in society.

Educational segregation is not hidden. Students know it exists, academia has studied it and the public sector has come up with ways to address it. So why don't we eradicate it? For the District's Secretary of Education, this is what happens: «If we were thinking in State policies and not government policies, we would probably have more consistent social cohesion results (...) I have always said that in education everyone knows what to do, the problem is to do it right.» 

This is precisely what the authors of The fifth door propose. Mauricio García Villegas, co-editor of the book, explained it this way: «We believe that this is such an important issue, that it should give rise to a kind of social contract. A great agreement, not exclusively political, but a great social agreement of the nation, to build a public, basic, multi-class education system. I have not lost hope that this great national project can be carried out. As long as this is not done, Colombian society will have enormous difficulties, not only to progress economically and socially, but also to build kinder, calmer, more consensual and more democratic societies». In this regard, María José Álvarez explains that it is difficult for a politician to be interested in a project that is more than 4 years old. This great agreement would require prioritizing education, committing to it with a high investment and promoting close collaboration between the public and private sectors. 

«A fundamental concern of the state should be that people, regardless of their birth, regardless of their surnames, regardless of the social class they come from, have equal opportunities to move up the social ladder. And public education is the ideal mechanism to achieve this. The big problem is that in Colombia, that public education is not only not achieving that social equality task, but it is doing just the opposite, which is favoring the reproduction of social classes as they are.» But how do we achieve such a state policy agreement that prioritizes education? This special suggested to us that the path begins with society as a whole demanding public, multi-class, quality education. 

To achieve this, the right incentives must be put in place. Sandra Sánchez López, historian and professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the Universidad de los Andes, insists that economics must take a more heterodox turn to address this problem. «Is the suffering of others not incentive enough?» she asked us. And it should be. Inequality is cruel, it is a lack of empathy for our species; as individuals, we should not put up with it and, as a society, tolerate it. If we are indifferent to it, we sacrifice the capacity of human beings to unite and we end up in alienated societies, with increasingly hermetic walls. But I think this is the beauty of classical economics, which was born from the liberal idea of conceiving man “as he is” and not as he should be. So it is possible to propose such incentives (with a heterodox approach). I think history has proven that competitive equilibrium is good, as long as it does not leave so many people out.

In this sense, the responsibility for education also falls on our behavior. In the end, it is between all of us that we must reach this great national agreement. Educational segregation worries us and initiates conversations, but political interests and their periods of government make any solution impossible. Talking about education brings with it a nostalgia for a united and just society. Someone who was very concerned about the loss of unity among human beings was the philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin. He has a phrase that sums up what the aspiration of a society should be and fits very well when thinking about education: «That, thus, man may keep what as a child he promised.» I hope this special has communicated the growing sense of urgency of that promise.

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