If a young, authoritarian, and poor country manages to organize itself to grow, the early stages of its development will be more explosive and simpler. Going from nothing to something is both miraculous and easy. The hard part comes later, when the country is no longer so young, no longer so poor, and has been democratizing. Each additional stretch of the development effort is harder. Providing social services to a people who barely have shoes and drinking water is easier than offering services to massive middle classes full of expectations. And growing now requires improving the productivity of every worker, since there are fewer of them and their labor has become more expensive. That swamp of problems in which so many countries get stuck is called the "middle-income trap." And Chile is sunk in it up to its waist. That is why we now wander around with our heads down.
What happened to us? We failed to improve our productivity, despite decades of trying. What is productivity? It is the ability to obtain more and better results in less time and with fewer resources. This demands developing, on a massive scale, specific capacities and skills. And the critical stage in which this occurs is childhood. That is why Minister María Paz Arzola is absolutely right when she argues that if we want to improve education in Chile, we must give priority to early education over secondary and higher education. Two linked reasons support her: the higher return of early education and the credentialist drift of secondary and higher education. Broadly speaking, there are two main ways of describing the educational process: one is human capital theory—people gain skills through education, which are certified by the degrees they obtain—and the other is credentialist theory, which holds that no skills are gained in the educational process; rather, people compete for degrees that open and close doors. The economist James Heckman, who comes from the human capital school, noted that the capacity to acquire new skills tends to decline over time (the Heckman curve), so the credentialist description becomes more accurate the more advanced the educational process is. In other words, the critical stage for achieving substantive changes in human productivity is the one corresponding to preschool and primary education. And there lies the secret of our failure: in Chile we have never taken that educational stage seriously. Our education budget has multiplied several times over in recent decades, but the priority has never been to give children the cognitive and emotional stimulation they need. Being a child in our country is, in general, terrible, according to almost all existing measurements. So if we truly want to change Chile, that change must begin with childhood. The productivity of Chileans will never improve if the vast majority of students finish the first and second cycles of primary school without understanding what they read or handling basic arithmetic, and without being able to sit down and concentrate for a while on some task. We will never be a developed country without world-class schools, with world-class teachers (which implies professionals, salaries, and working conditions to match) and families committed to their children learning and loving to learn.
Where has most of the money gone? To higher education. Exactly where it is least useful, but where the most coveted credentials are. First the CAE (student loans), then free tuition. Massifying degrees, but not knowledge, which ends up transferring functional illiteracy to many university classrooms, and breaking the hearts of thousands of students and their families once they leave with their piece of paper and end up unemployed or underemployed. That is the story I tried to explain in my essay "Sueños de cartón" (2024), which reality has sharpened. Minister Arzola is right to raise the banner of early education and to try to reverse the failed education investment priorities we have carried with us. And she also contributes the germ of a narrative of social justice and inclusive development for a right that has lacked, until now, both.
NEWSLETTER
Opinion
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