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Rural Poverty Report 2011
BOX 20 Rural education in Colombia: the Tutorial Learning System (SAT)
The Tutorial Learning System, or Sistema de
Aprendizaje Tutorial (SAT), is a rural-oriented
secondary educational system developed in
Colombia by FUNDAEC, the Foundation for
the Application and Teaching of the Sciences.
At the time of SAT’s inception there were few
rural educational programmes, and those that
existed by and large did not meet rural people’s
expectations. The SAT emerged out of a desire for
an educational curriculum that is relevant to rural
communities, helps create economic alternatives
to farming and supports social organization,
economic development and community well-being.
The SAT methodology fosters a co-worker
relationship between students and tutors, who
often also come from rural areas. FUNDAEC
wrote a new curriculum for SAT, instead of
simply layering a few basic rural vocational skills,
such as animal husbandry or soil chemistry, onto
a traditional urban curriculum. Rather than
dividing subjects into traditional categories, like
biology, mathematics and social studies, the SAT
curriculum takes an integrated approach that
combines all three subjects in, for example, a
discussion of how insect populations reproduce
(biology) exponentially (maths) given the right
conditions (social studies and ecology). The
result is an integrated curriculum that makes
sense to youth raised in rural areas, and still
covers the same subjects without losing any
rigour. The curriculum also contains a strong
measure of moral education, as it is organized
around the concept of service to the community
and emphasizes basic moral values like
honesty, trustworthiness and trusteeship.
Through SAT, rural students gain comprehensive
knowledge in agriculture, animal husbandry,
soil chemistry and other fields traditionally
associated with rural vocations. But SAT is also
credited as energizing students, giving them
confidence and helping them develop capacity
to create microenterprises and participate in
community development. Graduates also take
on public posts in the communities and, with
additional training, they can establish their own
SAT tutorial programmes.
FUNDAEC has successfully implemented SAT
in Colombia through a network of 30 NGOs
with 400 tutors, in collaboration with the
Ministry of Education, and it has benefited over
50,000 student participants in rural communities.
It has now been implemented in seven other
countries in Central and South America; and
with the translation of SAT texts into English,
some NGOs are experimenting with the
programme in Zambia and other African nations.
Sources: http://www.fundaec.org/; Hanks (2006); One Country (1996)
imparting of literacy skills with aspects that directly impinge on the economic life
of the people hold a greater potential to succeed than those with limited scope,
focusing on illiteracy removal as the main goal.” 277 In India, non-standardized,
locally developed curricula corresponding to the priorities and life ways of both
children and adult learners were found to be key ingredients of successful
programmes. 278 These features are shown clearly in the SAT programme, which
originated in Colombia (box 20).
Change is also needed in higher-level educational institutions to respond to the
new environment for sustainable agricultural intensification, and to prepare
agricultural graduates for new kinds of employment opportunities. In many parts of