Don’t You Want Your Child to Be Better than You: Enacting Ideologies and Contesting Intercultural Policy in Peru

Abstract

The implementation of Bilingual Intercultural Education (BIE) in Peru began in the mid-nineties, during a time of social, economic, and political crises exacerbated by a civil war of unprecedented violence that began in 1980 and ended in 2000. It emerged in response not only to this internal upheaval but also to the international Education for All (EFA) agenda that emphasized universal educational access and to a trend toward BIE fomented by bilateral aid agencies, such as Germany’s Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ). Peru’s BIE policy focused on providing education to one of the poorest and historically most neglected sectors in the country: indigenous populations. A new constitution in 1993 placed indigenous people, at least nominally, at the center of the government efforts to expand educational access and to democratize the country. The Peruvian government officially adopted BIE to manage cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diversity and indigenous revitalization, primarily among the country’s six million Quechua speakers. Nonetheless, as I have argued elsewhere (Valdiviezo 2006), BIE policy was less a national educational response than it was an element in the country’s foreign policy; therefore, while the BIE policy directed attention to an underserved population, it lacked fundamental information about the local communities to be affected and putatively helped by BIE.