Maria del Carmen Arriola

In a country that has made no provision for education of students younger than six, María del Carmen Arriola has developed an effective way to launch programs that stimulate children's intellectual and physical development from the earliest ages, and she is poised to institutionalize these programs through the mechanisms of appropriate agencies.

On the basis of eighteen years as both primary educator and teacher-trainer, María del Carmen Arriola became convinced of the importance of mental and physical stimulation for young children long before they reach the age of official school enrollment. In the absence of any support from the state for such initiatives, she launched the first early-childhood development center in her province in 1982, and later developed the first curriculum in Paraguay for the training of preschool teachers. María is now pioneering the introduction of both formal and non formal preschool and childcare programs in Paraguay. She has gained recognition from the Ministry of Education for her certificate course for preschool teachers and has developed a process whereby students enrolled in her course actually set up and run learning centers called Mita Rogas (Guaraní for "children's homes") for children aged three to six in marginal and rural areas of her home province. María has been asked by the Ministry of Education to consolidate her program throughout the province, but she is already designing a strategy for multiplication at the national level, by inserting a preschool option into the official curricula of the teacher-training colleges in each of Paraguay's sixteen provinces. She is also working on a pilot project that trains mothers to set up childcare centers for infants aged seven months to three years, so as to extend the positive benefits of early stimulation even to the youngest of children. The great innovation in her idea involves not only the introduction of early-childhood programs into the formal educational network, but also the creative use of students-in-training to launch preschool centers that carry the message of early stimulation into neighborhoods and settings where official programs are unlikely to reach.

While the significance of early childhood education is now taken for granted in many countries as an important guarantor of subsequent intellectual development, there was absolutely no precedent established for the systematic provision of such programs when María began to switch her own focus from primary to preschool education. The concept had been alluded to in official documents as early as 1922, and in 1957 the Ministry of Education even instituted guidelines governing how such classes might be implemented. However, no funds were allocated to preschool education in any Paraguayan budget in the years before María set up her first project. In 1985, The United Nations Children's Fund issued a report on the state of education in Paraguay and drew critical attention to the lack of adequate preschool programs in the country. Stung by the potential for loss of prestige in the international community, the government responded with ambitious plans for incorporating such programs into its official policies and called on María to act as a consultant in the formation of a massive effort to recruit volunteers to staff day-care centers across the country.
However, as she had expected from the start, this initiative failed for several reasons. Firstly, it was implemented so suddenly that no appropriate preliminary efforts were made to educate mothers about the importance of early stimulation in their children's development. Unconvinced from the start as to the value of such programs, mothers were reluctant to commit their energies and proved unreliable volunteers. Secondly, the scale of the project was so grand, attempting to redress the problem on a national scale all at once, that its administrative capabilities were inadequate to the task, and it soon lapsed into irrelevance without leaving any lasting impact. As a result, despite the publicity and fiscal investment, Paraguay still had no preschool educational system in place in the early 1990s. A 1993 educational reform legalized the creation of kindergarten classes in public schools, but again assigned no budget for implementation, so the country's young children continued to languish without access to appropriate early stimulation.

Based on her own experience and a wealth of research and study of the topic, María started Paraguay's first two-year certificate program for preschool teachers in 1994 and fought to win accreditation from the Ministry of Education, which enabled her graduates to add kindergarten classes in the primary schools of her home province of La Cordillera. Lobbying, negotiating, and a new supply of trained teachers thus enabled the province to institute preschool classes in the formal system for the first time. However, María also designed her intervention to reach beyond the network of official schools. Thus, the first year of her program is built around a solid base of theory and technique, but the second year requires students to return to their home neighborhoods and establish contact with churches, schools, or community groups, with a view to setting aside a space in which they can create a "non formal" kindergarten, or Mita Roga. María supervises the students, coordinating their activities, facilitating self-management, and sensitizing local families to support the projects. Over a nine month period, each teacher attends between 20 and 30 children under six years of age, leading them through educational, recreational, and nutritional activities, and preparing a monthly report on the achievements and difficulties they experience with the children, families, and the community. The program is currently serving 642 children in 30 centers, located in fourteen of the twenty municipalities in the province. María's program achieves several important objectives at the same time. Firstly, it guarantees that the new corps of teachers launching "formal" preschool classes in the public system will begin their work with a substantial base of experience. Secondly, it rectifies the mistakes made by the original UNICEF-inspired effort, by starting on a small and manageable scale with adequate preparation and using the student-teachers to inform and enthuse the community over the course of the year about the importance and benefits of early childhood education. As a result, the student-teachers essentially recruit volunteers from the community to continue their work once their certificate program is completed and they go on to "formal" preschool assignments. María is also exploring the possibility of bringing student-teachers engaged in the primary school curriculum to volunteer for three months at the end of the preschool teachers' stints, so that the centers are staffed year-round.
Though María started her first kindergarten and subsequently her preschool teacher-training program as private initiatives, she realizes that to achieve national impact she must work through the Ministry of Education to influence policy. She has thus maintained a part-time consulting relationship with the Ministry, which has earned her credibility and acceptance among the decision-makers and access to the directors of the teacher-training colleges in each province. She is able to meet on a regular basis with the people who design and implement the curriculum for teachers, and she was recently invited by the Ministry to make a presentation on early childhood stimulation and the Mita Roga experience to their national assembly, where she received important indications of interest from several of the directors thereafter. Her strategy is to replicate her model in each of Paraguay's sixteen provinces, first by instituting the preschool option for teachers in their own formation process and introducing pre-primary classes in state schools, then by sending student-teachers back into their communities, as part of their training, to establish early-learning centers and train parents to maintain them.

The daughter of two teachers, María wanted a vocation to the field of education from an early age. She went to Argentina for university training, married an Argentine and stayed there for several years before returning to her home town of Caacupe in La Cordillera province. Based on what she had seen in Argentina, she was horrified to see how little attention was being paid to early childhood development in Paraguay and became convinced that poor academic performance in subsequent years was a function of children being introduced to a strict learning environment in primary school for which they had received no real preparation. Resolving to do something about this problem, she opened her own preschool, but she soon realized that with one school she would not achieve significant impact. It was then that she began to explore alternatives, learning especially from the failure of the UNICEF-inspired Program for Non-School-Based Early Education, before developing her own concept of the Mita Rogas and the low-cost, mutually beneficial use of student-teachers to staff them.