Multicultural Educational Reform in the Andes: Better institutions? Or better populism?

In South American Andes, in Ecuador during Rafael Correa's presidency (2007-2017), who is catalogued by the literature as a multicultural populist leader of a competitive authoritarian nature (Levitsky & Loxton 2013; De la Torre 2013; Alberti 2019), it was developed an educational reform in 2016, which had as a novelty strong emphasis on citizen training from a historical, political and legal approach to citizen practices (Siede 2013) with an multicultural constitutional approach. This, through the subjects of History, Philosophy and Education in Citizenship. In this sense, this research investigates inside the contents of students’ textbooks to find out if they generate a liberal or civic republican type of citizenship (Walzer 2001). And, within this conceptualization, understand if the contents encourage to students to believe in strong democratic institutions or to believe in a strong competitive authoritarian populist leadership (Levitsky and Loxton 2013). I mean, the ways in which these courses make understand the political reality of Ecuador analyzing if the Ecuadorian nature imparted is based on the understanding of citizenship as a national group of different ethnic groups and cultures based on the Ecuadorian territory, in which they have the possibility of accessing quality educational and health services regardless of the government in power. Or rather, if this educational implementation was part of the state communication strategy to strengthen the electoral power of President Rafael Correa, who according to Alberti (2019) is classified as a multicultural populist leader, which according to this author, the multicultural in the Andes is used by populism only in his electoral political rhetoric and not in the implementation of public policy. That said, the current relevance of this research is that this educational reform is still in force in Ecuador and although Correa is no longer president of this country, his political movement is the first force in the national congress and they are constantly trying to get their leader to participate again in a presidential election, eliminating the legal impediments that today prevent this populist leader from exercising his political rights. Therefore, the current educational contents on citizen training probably would be promoting Correa's electoral return to the state power more than developing a democratic citizenship training.