I had no idea Jaime Saavedra was the Peruvian Minister of Education, let alone the fact that he was the opening speaker for the TEDxTukuy Conference. I basically went from sleeping in the chair to being extremely surprised when I saw him, as he walked to the little round red carpet in the stage. I was really interested in what he was about to say, mainly because he was a politician with a lot of influence and I wanted to see how good he was at selling himself as an the “best” Minister of Education. But more than that, I wanted to hear how someone with a title like that managed to bring solutions to such a complicated issue that was plaguing Peru--education.
To be completely honest, I was expecting for him to sugar coat all of the issues and talk about irrelevant things, like a lot of politicians do. However, he started off in a interesting way, stating why Peru was so behind in education. Peru only invests 3.5% of its GDP in education. The Minister went on talking about how we needed to raise this percentage to 5%, in order to implement more technology in school and create a solid curriculum, but most importantly: raising the salaries of teachers. This very last point caught my attention and got me wondering that there might be an even deeper cause for this issue. Hence, I couldn’t stop thinking about the following: Why doesn’t the government invest more money in the training of teachers? I know very little about education related-issues in Peru, but I don’t need to be a genius to believe there is a lack of incentive from the government. Hence, then the real question is: Why would there be a lack of motivation for the government to foster education in the country? It’s common knowledge that education is what pushes a country forward and generates jobs. After reflecting upon this, I came to the conclusion that it probably had to do with the little glitch there is in democracy. Because democracy is based on what the majority wants, the main goal of politicians is to please the population, in order to get reelected or be supported in future projects. Nevertheless, if the government decided to raise teacher salaries this year, the effects of this action would be seen on the long term. Most importantly, in a longer time than 5 years. This pushes the politicians to take actions that will have a quick return in investment, not too risky, and visible for the population to see. I might be incorrect about lack of incentive from the government being the real root of this problem, since education in Peru has so many directions that I may not be aware of. However, I am positive that the short term goals that politicians do to "please the majority" affects greatly the development of our country. Big leaps need to be made, and politicians have to start behaving like the leaders they were elected to be.
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