SEDI - DEC - Department of Education and Culture of the OAS
UDSE
Untitled Document
Declaration by the Education Ministers of the Americas
We, the Ministers of Education of the member countries of the Organization of American States, on the occasion of the Second Meeting of Ministers of Education under the aegis of CIDI-OAS, held at Punta del Este, Republic of Uruguay, as regards all matters relating to the education of our peoples, embrace the Declaration of Québec signed by the Heads of State and Government in April 2001 and the Plan of Action of the Third Summit of the Americas:
We recognize the progress that has been made in pursuit of the education commitments entered into at the Second Summit of the Americas, most particularly: education in values and attention for vulnerable groups; special education; bi-lingual and intercultural education; programs to raise the professional profile of teachers and education administrators; strengthening education management; and using information and communications technologies in education. We also reaffirm the need to continue with the regional indicator and educational assessment projects as focal points with which to fully analyze the situation of education in the continent and to guide education policy decision-making.
We pledge to develop and implement projects that will emphasize quality and equality in education in order to overcome failure at school in the different forms it adopts; to improve school management and teacher training, and the involvement of families and other social agents; to offer proper secondary education and training services to young people, and the certification of job skills, so as to improve their incorporation into society and the productive apparatus; to strengthen higher education, science and technology, and academic mobility; and to promote new technologies at the service of education.
We resolve to strengthen the follow-up mechanism referred to in one of the resolutions of this Second Meeting of Ministers of Education, and to foster horizontal cooperation mechanisms, chiefly through exchanges of innovative education programs that have been consolidated in the region's countries. In addition, we propose the development of a group of experts in innovation that would allow the sharing of resources throughout the region.
We state our interest in further pursuing the incorporation of new technologies into education, in order to improve learning and as an instrument at the service of teaching processes within schools. We have established the Educational Portal of the Americas, an on-line instrument at the service of the democratization of education, the essential mandate of which is to disseminate the opportunities of high academic quality offered by the distance learning approach as a first response to the connectivity agenda of the Québec Summit.
We have received the report of the consultation process with civil society which began in the Summit and were informed about the recent creation of the Continental Secretariat for Education.
We call upon the international technical assistance and financing agencies, and the OAS Technical Secretariat, to strengthen and increase the dynamism of the inter-agency cooperation mechanism, so it can articulate the efforts of those agencies and with the education ministries in a convergent agenda that is connected to national and subregional education policies.
