Education and Development in Latin America by Gale Laurence;

Author:Gale, Laurence; [Laurence Gale]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 614870
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

Standards

Standards vary considerably from one university to another throughout Latin America, and indeed from one department to another within the same university. Low standards are the rule rather than the exception, and the reasons are not in dispute. In the first place the student arrives ill-prepared to begin academic specialization or to work on his own. Though the traditional function of the secondary schools has been to serve as a channel to the university, few of them succeed in installing the habit of reading. Most universities have a proportion of part-time students following evening courses, and some are no more than evening institutes whose facilities are used by young people already tired after a day's work. Libraries are almost non-existent in some places.The universities of Argentina are well provided, Buenos Aires having half a million volumes and La Plata a quarter of a million. The national universities of Chile and Uruguay have half a million each. At the other end of the continent Monterrey, for example, has one hundred thousand volumes. In Colombia the Andes has a good central library and an adequate specialist library in economics. The National University has some excellent faculty libraries, including the library of the Faculty of Agriculture at Medellin which has an international repute. The book resources of some of the smaller universities, however, are pathetic. The Colombian Association of Universities calculated in 1964 that simply to cope with the need for books of additional students who would enter universities by 1968 two million volumes would have to be added to the libraries.

Some of the new universities have made special efforts to establish and maintain high standards. There has been no exact Latin American parallel to the arrangements in British territories whereby new colleges such as the University College of the West Indies in Jamaica, were constituted as parts of the University of London until they felt their standards were sufficiently established to warrant independent status as full universities offering their own degrees. Nevertheless, the special relationship which enabled the University of the Andes during the early years of its existence to send its engineering students to complete their degree course to the University of Illinois, and other North American universities, was not entirely different. The scheme helped 'the Andes' to build up reputable standards so that when later it came to complete its own degrees they were widely accepted. The Technological Institute of Monterrey in Mexico adopted a different and unique method in Latin America to attain the same end. It sought membership of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools of the United States of America. The application committed the University to a profound self-examination of every aspect of the work, and subsequently to a prolonged investigation of its report by a visiting inspection team on the part of the Association. Membership was only granted when the Association had satisfied itself that the standards of the University of Monterrey were of the highest.

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