NATIVE LANGUAGES AND EDUCATION IN PERU

2ND PART OF SPEECH DELIVERY

EDUCATION

INTRODUCTION

Recognizing that we are a diverse, multicultural and multilingual country is not and has not been
easy. Throughout our history, diversity has been perceived as a problem that in the minds of
many has impeded the development of Peru. It is has for us to see and discover diversity as
wealth and opportunity. This difficulty in recognizing ourselves as different, but equal in dignity
and rights, has generated multiple efforts to try standardize the country, to force those who are
different to be equal.

The Peruvian educational system, though out its republican history, has tried to achieve this goal
and has promoted educational policies aimed at homogenizing all students in the country, the
enormous variety of people, cultures and languages that our vast and diverse national territory
encompasses.

The low learning results of our children, especially those obtained by indigenous children, are a
reflection of the failure of this education with curricular and pedagogical models that have not
been able to respond to the diversity of the country with relevant and quality proposals at the
same time. On the contrary, they have aggravated the inequity and injustice conditions in which
the most vulnerable population sectors live.

However, the Ministry of Education (MINEDU) wanted to reserve this situation and established
as priorities the attention to rural areas of the country and students with a native culture and
language.

In this way the Ministry of Education in 2015 and 2016 approved the Intercultural Bilingual
School.

MINEDU defines the intercultural Bilingual School as program that give an educational service
of quality for children and teenagers also, who belong to small towns who speak a native
language as their first or second language.

The Intercultural Bilingual School are characterized for being a schools with a curriculum and
bilingual pedagogical proposal, with educational materials, related to their native language and to
Spanish, with trained teachers in EIB (intercultural bilingual education) these teachers must
handle both language native and Spanish.

Besides, it promotes the participation of teachers, students and parents of the community in the
educative processes.
During the participation in the regional congress of indigenous languages for Latin America and
the Caribbean held in Cusco. The ministry of education: Nora Delgado, said that in these
institutions children learn in their native language and indicated that there was 11, 873 schools of
early years of education are attended, as well as 11,819 schools for primary education and 3, 170
schools for secondary education.

She also asserted that the MINEDU registered 43 original language with their respective official
alphabet and 5 that have completed their normalization process.

Peru currently has 26,862 intercultural bilingual education institutions (EIB) where there are 1
million 239,389 children, adolescents and young people who speak one of the 48 original
language registered in our country.