by Rod Hughes

Minister of Education Leonardo Garnier had a unique (for Costa Rica) message to universities this week: “Enough teachers, already.” In the past, Costa Rica has always had an insatiable appetite for every teacher the educational system could turn out, but the declining birthrate in the country has gradually changed that picture drastically.

As little as 15 years ago, the birthrate was 3.2 children per woman. Today it is .9. At the turn of this century there were 539,000 kids in primary school. This year only 509,000 are enrolled. This means a glut of teachers, being graduated at an insane clip of 1,600 yearly. This year the Ministry of Education employed 25,500 grade school teachers, the vast majority with tenure. Only 2,000 openings existed in the system but more than 30,000 applied.

The profession is something of a sacred cow in education-conscious Costa Rica, one of the first countries in Latin America with universal education for both sexes. In past times, being a teacher was the handhold by which many young adults pulled themselves up from poverty into the middle class. A poor family would sacrifice to send their child to be trained as a teacher at the “normal school” at Heredia, a college that has since become the National University.

But those were days in which the government could not build classrooms fast enough to keep up with the birthrate and were often hard-pressed to train teachers fast enough. For now, the pinch is being felt in grade school but as the lower birthrate continues, high schools will begin to see the pinch. And the need for new classrooms is more about replacing antiquated school buildings and shifting population centers than about growth.

But some teacher-training specialists see the situation as an opportunity to train teachers more dedicated to students’ needs than in the salaries and perks demanded by their politically powerful unions. They foresee a time to go for quality and forget quantity, focusing on creating a professional with imagination and creativity. Ironically, the current glut occurs at a time of low unemployment in other professions, especially business-related ones, and in skills ranging from engineering to carpentry.