9 - Balancing Global Education Policy and Inclusive Education in Costa Rica: Capitalist Pressures, Social-Democratic Tendencies, and Technological Responses

Summary

Introduction

This chapter explores the impacts of global forces (such as international political-economic trends) on education and highlights the specific case of Costa Rica, where technology companies with capitalist motives were able to influence the country's education system. It also describes local efforts in Costa Rica to address or mitigate the effects of these global forces by establishing a new educational reform. Specifically, it presents how Costa Rica's political apparatus addressed the needs of the global economy while also attempting to increase educational equity. To this end, I highlight how the specific Tecno@prender programme, referred to in Costa Rica as the Programa Nacional de Tecnologias Moviles (National Programme of Mobile Technologies), was an example of inclusive education that was caught between global and local pressures.

By examining these issues, this chapter highlights various tensions during and since 2011 that Costa Rica has experienced due to global and local interactions in and through the making and implementation of its national education reform. The first tension, as will be discussed later on, resulted from the Public Education Ministry (Ministerio de Educacion Publica [MEP]) actively ensuring that economic and political forces acted together to contribute to the country's education reform. The second tension resulted from the MEP attempting to address challenges in implementation to ensure reform efforts offered equitable opportunities. The tensions experienced by Costa Rica are not unique to this country and thus can help to shed light on the challenges faced by other countries in the region (and beyond) when it comes to developing and putting into practice policies that simultaneously respond to reform pressures with conflicting purposes (for example, economic growth vs. equity/inclusion).

To explain the role of multinational corporations and international standards in education reform and its impact in Costa Rica, this chapter is divided into five sections. In the first section, I present some initial background information by characterizing the immediate policy context. In the second section, I briefly comment on the theoretical approach around which this chapter is based.