State, education and indigenous peoples in the Ecuadorian Andes

Abstract

This article presents some of the results of the doctoral thesis developed by the author. The article analyzes the impact that the process of institutionalization of intercultural bilingual education in Ecuador had in those initiatives of education controlled by indigenous communities. The research was supported on the contributions of Critical Pedagogy and Latin American Anthropology: from the first one, it took the concept of education as a cultural and politic practice; from the second one, it took the analytical perspective of the cultural control theory. Related to the methodology, the research made a study case of an emblematic experience of indigenous education in the country: the Sistema de Escuelas Indígenas de Cotopaxi (SEIC), and data was collected through oral history and review for primary sources. The hypothesis that the article seeks to argue is that the process of institutionalization of the intercultural bilingual education finished undermining the community nature of the SEIC and standardizi ng its educational proposal.