Education in Colombia
Education in Colombia includes nursery school, elementary school, high school, technical instruction and university education.
The Human Rights Measurement Initiative finds that Colombia is fulfilling only 80.5% of what it should be fulfilling for the right to education based on the country's level of income. HRMI breaks down the right to education by looking at the rights to both primary education and secondary education. While taking into consideration Colombia's income level, the nation is achieving 82.1% of what should be possible based on its resources for primary education but only 78.9% for secondary education.
Nursery school in Colombia
Most of the children over one year old are provided with daycare and nursery school in "Hogares Comunitarios" sponsored by the National Institute for Family Welfare, where mothers from the community take care of their own children, as well as the children from the immediate neighborhood. When children in Colombia learn how to read and write, they are usually transferred to the elementary school. There are also a large number of private kindergarten facilities.Elementary school
Elementary school comprises 5 years of formal education. Children usually enroll into grade 1, at age five. The net primary enrollment attending elementary school in 2001 totaled 89.5 percent. In some rural areas, teachers are poorly qualified and dropout rates are high. In urban areas, on the other hand, teachers are generally well prepared and knowledgeable of their profession.Colombia developed the method of teaching known as Escuela Nueva or “New School.” The method transforms the conventional learning paradigm where the teacher is the only one talking and conveying information in a classroom. The idea is that students are placed in the center of the learning process in rural communities. Decades after the model was first developed in 1975, Escuela Nueva has received support — including financial — from the Colombian government, Unesco, and The World Bank, and was implemented into a national educational policy in Colombia in the late 1980s. By 1988, Unesco declared that Colombia was the only country in Latin America and the Caribbean where rural schools outperformed urban schools because of the Escuela Nueva method. Between 2007 and 2009, the program taught 700,000 children in Colombia, and the model is now implemented in 20,000 schools across the country. Escuela Nueva has now expanded internationally to 17 countries, including Brazil, the Philippines and India, benefiting more than five million children.
Secondary school
Secondary and fourth education is divided in basic secondary and mid secondary. The upper-secondary education offers many different "tracks", which all lead to their own "Bachiller" after a curriculum of two years. Out of the usual academic curriculum, the students can follow one of the following technical tracks : Industrial track, Commercial track, Pedagogical Track, Agricultural Track, social promotion track.The "Bachiller" is required to continue into academic or professional higher Education. Nonetheless, technical and professional institutions of higher Education can also welcome students with a "qualification in Arts and business". This qualification is granted by the SENA after a two-year curriculum.