Educational Policies, Pedagogical Orientations, and the Democratizing Promise of Public Education: Peru, 1821–2021

Abstract

The article covers two centuries of the history of public education in Peru, focusing on the relationship between the intellectual and political debates on education and pedagogical orientations, social dynamics, government initiatives, and the characteristics of the implementation of educational policies. We examine the political and cultural tensions in defining the orientations of education between 1821 and 1905, and their continuity from 1905 to the beginning of the 1950s, the  relationship with external pedagogical trends, as well as the influence of indigenism on educational policies. Next, we study the confluence between the developmentalist discourse, the expansion of the State and the demands of new political forces, driving the massification of education until the end of the twentieth century. We conclude with the educational policies in this century, that fail to solve factors of exclusion, or the impoverishing effects of corruption.