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El Salvador Education
Public education was a higher priority than health care for
government spending, and statistics reflected this disparity.
School attendance and literacy in general increased notably in El
Salvador as a whole during the twentieth century, particularly
during the 1960s, when an ambitious program of school
construction was carried out. Officially, literacy increased from
26.2 percent of the adult population in 1930 to 59.7 percent in
1971. By 1980 only 31 percent of the population aged ten years or
older was considered illiterate.
The Salvadoran education system included one year of
preschool, nine years of basic education, three years of
secondary education, and higher education at two universities and
several specialized postsecondary institutions. The curriculum at
the basic and secondary levels, developed by the Ministry of
Education, was uniform throughout the country. The provision of
education, however, suffered from a rural-urban dichotomy.
Countrywide statistics displayed the weakness of the school
system on the secondary level; in a 1976 study, only 34 percent
of students reached grade nine, and 15 percent reached grade
twelve.
In the 1970s, primary-school enrollment increased by 90
percent. The benefit of such schooling, however,
disproportionately favored urban areas, especially San Salvador,
even though the majority of the illiterate population lived in
rural areas. Stated differently, in 1980 about 40 percent of the
rural population over age ten was illiterate, as compared with 25
percent of the urban dwellers. In the 1970s, fewer than twothirds of school-age rural children attended primary schools, as
compared with more than 90 percent of their urban counterparts.
About 8 percent of the country's total enrollment in middle
secondary education, grades seven through nine, were rural
children; at the upper secondary level, grades ten through
twelve, about 1 percent were rural children. In addition,
illiteracy was twice as prevalent among women as among men; only
about 30 percent of higher education students were female.
The high degree of rural illiteracy reflected several
factors. At the most basic level, the number of teachers and
schools provided for rural areas was seriously inadequate. In the
1970s, only 15 percent of the nation's schoolteachers served in
rural areas; although 64 percent of primary schools were in rural
areas, only 2 percent of secondary schools were. Existing rural
schools were able to accommodate only 43 percent of the rural
school-age population. Furthermore, of the primary schools
available for rural children, approximately 70 percent offered
education only below grade five. By contrast, 90 percent of urban
primary schools offered grade five or above. In rural areas, the
1976 student-to-teacher ratio was sixty to one, as compared with
forty to one in urban areas.
In addition, there was a high attrition rate in school
attendance in rural areas as students left school to earn incomes
or work at home. It is significant that although school
attendance generally began at about the age of eight or nine,
about 70 percent of all male workers began work before the age of
fifteen, many by age ten or earlier, thus permitting only one or
two years of schooling. Many girls also dropped out of school at
an early age to assume domestic responsibilities, such as caring
for younger siblings, working in the fields, or tending animals.
Therefore, in 1976 only about 20 percent of rural school-age
children reached grade six, and only 5.7 percent reached grade
nine.
Efforts to improve this situation in the rural agricultural
areas were somewhat discouraging, in part because of the
political tensions of the 1980s. In some situations, teachers,
mainly women, faced threats if they were thought to be supporters
of political change. Furthermore, many rural landowners seemed to
prefer an uneducated rural population, on the grounds that better
educated workers would expect better wages and be more likely to
organize and lobby the government for reform, particularly land
reform. A number of national education plans developed by the
Ministry of Education had recognized the disparity between rural
and urban education, but none had succeeded in bringing rural
education up to the urban level.
Data as of November 1988
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