The president of Plan Ceibal was born in Bolivia and lived in London. He is an engineer with a master's degree in telecommunications. He says that people like to "declare the importance of education", although he does not materialize it, that in Uruguay "conflict is business" and that management is not seen as important.
Ten years after the Ceibal Plan, more than a million tablets have been delivered and there is no discussion about the equity it has generated in children. How has education improved?
First of all, let's talk about fairness because Uruguay is a country that takes everything for granted and the glass is always half empty. We're one point away from qualifying and we're playing badly. Today there is no gap in access to computers for children and young people and the effect of the Ceibal Plan in households made a number of parents buy remanufactured computers to have at home in addition to the Ceibal. The only place where there is a gap is in the over-65 age group, which is now covered by Plan Ibirapitá. It is so incredible the transformation that the world has undergone in the last ten years that we do not realize it. When the Ceibal Plan was launched, there was no iPhone or tablet. The Internet at home was mostly dial-up. It is not to say that we jumped two steps, we made a giant leap as a country. Today all children have access to computers and the Internet and that does not exist in the world. When you say that all urban schools in the world have fiber optics, they can't believe it. In the United States they are still discussing who pays for the deployment of fiber optics. Since 2011 we started to build different platforms to serve education. Obviously it is much easier to deploy machines than platforms. We have a mathematics platform available for public and private users in which we did about 40 million activities in 2016. Our goal is to give a tool to the system so that it can use it and there will be transformations. If you are a math teacher, you don't have to worry about preparing exercises, you give them to them and each one follows its own path and if it can't solve it, it starts to see what the problem is and at the end of the day it tells the teacher. When are we going to see the results? It takes years until you see the results!
Personalization was an attraction of the plan. To what extent was Ceibal's potential developed?
If a teacher is good at mathematics with the platform, he or she will be much better. If a teacher doesn't use the platform and doesn't like mathematics, we have a problem. This issue is not solved by technology. There is no doubt that the mathematics platform personalizes education. How many years will it take? I don't know, but the world is moving towards personalized education. How are we facing the world? We're ahead of the curve. We build platforms for the system to take them. And it does. We just bought one for books and they're going to be able to do book clubs. Now, if we want magic, we have to go somewhere else. The magic here is that we need teachers to accompany, a father, a mother, a grandfather. Just because we have a reading platform, we are not going to improve. There is a game called Dragon Box and the children play and learn algebra. We have a program for children in first, second and third grade to learn to program. But this is a glass half empty country, every conflict is much more interesting than the good things. And you have to look at English. Today it is universal in primary school in the fourth, fifth and sixth grades. 80,000 children learn by videoconference, more than the Centenary Stadium. How much is it worth for a country to have all its children learning English? There is a new world we are going to and a new way of teaching based on projects. We're going to have about 400 groups where we're doing real-life problems and working in teams. Technology in the classroom has two roles: either it does something that otherwise you wouldn't be able to do, like English or books, or it accelerates pedagogies and allows learning several disciplines at the same time. An example: the kids who won the second prize in robotics at the high school in San Luis made a doghouse that detects the weather and moves it to avoid wind and water. That is the world we have to go to and Ceibal has done a very strong work. But this is a very complicated country in the anxiety for results.
Is the support of the interested teacher, the accompanying family, the weak point?
In Uruguay, people like to declare the importance of education, but they don't put it into practice, otherwise it's hard to understand how so many people drop out of school, not in the lowest quintiles but in the highest quintiles. Almost 20% of people in the fifth quintile do not finish sixth grade. This is unacceptable. Today it is acceptable for society that someone does not finish high school. There will be a transformation of education when the whole of society values the importance of education, and not only declares it, because declaring it is very easy.
Do you think the issue is too politicized?
Yes, overly politicized. In general. Parents ask teachers what they have to do as parents. Parents have to be with their children to do their homework or to ask them how they did in class or to help them read. The school can't be a substitute for parents, for support and everything. There has to be much more parental activity and much less politicization. We are going to a world with a lot of work. Society has to be aware of this and not only ask the educational system.
A new Accountability is coming and education promises to put up a fight.
I'm not going to get involved. It's too politicized. We have to increase the budget. The most important thing is to eliminate the backwardness of those who aren't in their year of study. For me it's the system's most serious problem and that's clearly where the money has to be put.
What needs to be done to improve?
You have to have a general plan and different solutions to different problems. I don't think you have to have 1,000 programs for 1,000 problems. You have to find the three most important ones and solve them, and ANEP and the subsystems are clear about that. Probably more money, more actions and time are needed.
What do you think it will change if you don't have a parliamentary majority?
It's going to get complicated but we're going to have to learn to dialogue. It's one thing to lose the parliamentary majority because someone has gone to the opposition and another because they tell you that there are things they will support and others that they won't support. In some aspects I am concerned about the lack of in-depth discussion on issues such as education and security. There is a lot of shouting, there are calls for resignations, but you have to look at what happens in other countries, how it has been solved, who has solved it and who has not. We have solved many more things than others. The big problem is that in Uruguay conflict is business, so there is systematically conflict.
He seems resigned...
No, I'm not resigned at all. But changing the idiosyncrasy... Let's understand what Uruguay we live in and let's work to make it better. If there is something that the last elections in the world have shown is that you have to see what the people want. Sometimes it is different from what some people want. At the discussion table we have to leave politics for a while and be honest.
What do you think of these electoral discussions within the Front?
I think it's healthy for there to be a generational renewal in the Front. We're in a cycle that's ending and one that's beginning. After three periods of government there has to be a renewal. Everyone who wants to should do politics in addition to what they do, but not blur their roles and that applies to all parties. The elections are in 2019, now we have to work.
You have said that the left owes itself a discussion between politics and management. Why?
Because you cannot deify management or politics. You have to do politics, but you have to manage it. Politics must always be there, what happens is that once it is defined it has to be well managed and I think that sometimes in the left and in Uruguay as a whole, management is not highlighted as important. A big problem is that those who are doing politics want to do management and those who are doing management want to do politics and it is the worst mix, it is a kind of atomic bomb.
Do you think the Frente Amplio could lose the government in 2019?
I believe that in 2019 the Front will win, I have no doubt, but I think we have to work to win.
Why are there key social issues that remain unresolved after three leftist governments, such as the fact that almost 40% of children are born into poverty?
If we look at the numbers from 2005 and today, they are different. We still have problems, but it's not the same. There are cultural and social issues that take time. The societies of the past had pillars of containment that were the family, the factories and society. In all three areas there has been deterioration. When there are so many single-parent families with 15-year-old mothers, it's complicated. We have to work. There are no miracles here. There are issues that take time.
"For many people the country is in another era."
The Ceibal Plan made an agreement with Google that allowed to give unlimited space in the cloud to save material and in Gmail. The fact generated controversy, there was talk of espionage, control, insecurity. Were you surprised by the reaction?
No, in Uruguay I am not surprised by any discussion. For many people Uruguay is in a different historical era. In this world we live in we have to be very clear about the principles on which we are going to be governed. Privacy, freedom, rights, and based on that we have to understand how the world works. What we cannot say is that we are not going to have data because they are going to steal from us. We have to take care of them. But in Uruguay we like to discuss everything. I hope that at some point some issues that have to do with the new ways of producing, the value of intellectual property, the value of remote work will be discussed in depth. Uruguay is a conservative country that has done very innovative things.
Mandarin and learn to program in agenda.
Last year President Tabaré Vázquez announced that Plan Ceibal would implement Mandarin Chinese language instruction. "We are working on that and seeing who will teach the course," Plan president Miguel Brechner responded to a query about when it will begin. "We are also with Jóvenes a Programar that at least more than 1,000 are going to start learning at the end of March or beginning of April," he said. The announcement of young programmers was made at the end of the year as part of one of the councils of ministers in the interior. According to Brechner there is "good demand". Today Ceibal trains children in programming in 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade of primary school. It is such a number that has been compenetrado with this that Brechner announced that there will be a competition with children who learn to program. Today the Ceibal Plan has a total of 120,000 people connected in the morning and a similar number in the afternoon.
Source: El País
Connect