Education in Costa Rica is an important topic with an impressive historiography. Educando a Costa Rica is a small book of only four chapters that challenges the existing literature and suggests new approaches. The aim of the authors is to put the spotlight on popular education and the cultural context of education as opposed to the traditional focus on institutional and political history. Only in the epilogue do the authors revisit the old debate over the role of education in making Costa Rica a democratic nation.
Each of the four studies is separate and independent. The first, by Molina Jiménez, is based on literacy statistics in Costa Rica and Nicaragua from 1880 to 1950 and analyzes regional, rural-urban, gender, and age differences. Among the interesting revelations is that literacy went down from 40.5 percent to 37.4 percent in Nicaragua from 1920 to 1950, but in Costa Rica literacy increased from...
