Youth and labour in Latin America: tensions and challenges for secondary education and vocational training

CLAUDIA JACINTO

The new secondary education: a path toward human development

UNESCO-OREALC

Año: 2002; p. 191 - 212

UNESCO has always sought to promote opportunities for countries to exchange ideasand work together. This publication, which has been made possible thanks to thefinancial contribution of the Government of Spain, brings together work carried outby researchers from various countries in the Ibero-American and Caribbean region,who have contributed their ideas to enrich reflection and debate on secondary education.This is an important effort to seek new paths to foster the education of ouryoung people.We have been witnesses during recent decades to increases in social and economicinequalities at the world level, and especially in our region. This situationdemands that our governments respond with measures that offer quality educationbased on equity to all of their people. The yet unpaid social debt to education requiresthat education policies respond to this pending agenda and help to dissolve the tensionspresent in today?s world.These include tensions between what is local and what is global. We are citizensof a world that is in continual change, in which we must learn to speak the language ofmodem technologies and be familiar with progress in science, while not forgetting ourcultural identity and without becoming disconnected from our roots.We are also aware of the tension between the long and the short term. We livesurrounded by a cloud of instantaneous information that tempts us to concentrate onlyon immediate problems, and which sometimes distract us from the more transcendentsubjects of our lives. Similarly, education policies must overcome the tension between the need to prepare ourselves for the development of science and necessarilyexpensive new technologies, and the concern to offer equal opportunities for educationto everyone. Moreover, that these tensions increase in the case of educating youngpeople, since it is within this group that social exclusion is perhaps most serious.Certainly, the creation of secondary education that offers equity and quality shouldbe everyone?s concern. Having available a publication such as this will help to fosterdebate and to deepen understanding in order to improve education policies and practicesdirected at adolescents and young people in the region.The secondary level is an area of education that demands our close attention. Itis a matter that is both diverse and complex, touching questions ranging from diversity,equity, structure, management, and new curricular content, to the effects of globalizationand linkages between academic and occupational training.The documents included herein treat some of these themes. The authors, whoare specialists from the Ibero-American and Caribbean region, are familiar with therealities of secondary education, and analyze them from various perspectives - thoseof researchers, managers, teacher trainers, supervisors, and others.The relevance of the subjects treated in the articles included in this publication,and the commitment of the authors we have invited to reflect upon secondary education,permit us to offer to the reader interested in the question important documentationfor analysis and for a better understanding of a key level in the education of theyoung people who will build our future societies.