academic achievement, depending on the socio-economic status of the school's student
body. Although low-income students seem to be slightly more aware than their high-
income peers of inequalities in society, all students tend to believe that individual
characteristics determine academic success. The egalitarian myth, then, is strong at the
individual level, and girls tend to endorse it even more than do boys.
The comparison between first-year and fifth-year students does not reveal a definite
pattern in the perceptions of school failure and value orientations of students, which
leads Braslavsky to conclude that the five-year school experience does not substantially
modify the distribution of perceptions based on gender and socio-economic positions
students bring to school. (Stromquist)
Bolivia
HEALY, Kevin (1991) Animating Grassroots Development: Women's Popular
Education in Bolivia, in: Grassroots Development, 15, 1, 26-34.
This article has to do with the work of CIMCA (Capacitacion Integral de la Mujer
Campesina), a grassroots organisation founded in 1982 by Evelyn Barron and Rita
Murillo. Its style was influenced by the work of Vasconcelo and Freire, taking the form
of a ratafolio: that is to say, a mobile 'civics programme' based on popular experience
and animated by the use of puppets, dramas and other visuals. Throughout the 1980s
the indigenous population suffered especially severely due to the level of male
migration to urban areas, leaving mothers, wives, sisters behind to eke out a living from
small family farms.
The project director at that time, Evelyn Barron, insisted that: "women are the great
untapped resource in Latin America, but are limited to agricultural occupations", but
she was under no illusions as to the level of official interest in CIMCA, observing that:
"we are setting our chance because almost everything else has failed". Indeed the aim of
CIMCA from the outset was to move away from aid-based development towards self-
help and empowerment. The project leaders and workers invested directly in people and
under-utilised facilities (such as church halls). Working out of Oruro they established
many locations of activity, touring by van and identifying educadora popular "a
popular education capable of promoting community development". Young single
women were the desired trainees.
There was some male backlash to contend with, especially as the movement gained a
foothold inside the traditional peasant organisations, and the women acquired a stronger
self-image. The contents of the rotafolio were products of local workshops, the effort
"channelling anger at the recognition of systematic discrimination towards a search for
effective remedial action". In effect they were creating "participatory institutes at the