12. Universal access to gratuitous and quality public education and promotion and defense of culture and sport

We commit to guarantee universal and unrestricted access to comprehensive, public, free and quality education to promote equity among men and women, strengthen democratic values and prepare citizens, both men and women, for their active inclusion into social life. We acknowledge autonomy in managing each school, within the framework of a national and decentralized, inclusive, and multiple modality educational model. Peruvian education will emphasize ethical, social and cultural values, developing ecologic awareness and including disabled people.

With this objective, the State: (a) will guarantee universal access to pre-school education that may ensure comprehensive health, nutrition and early stimulation development for boys and girls from zero to five years, taking into account ethnical, cultural and sociolinguistic diversity in the country; (b) will eliminate quality gaps between public and private education as well as between rural and urban education, to foster equity in access to opportunities; (c) will promote strengthening and revaluing of the teaching profession, through a social pact that will imply reciprocal commitments to guarantee optimal professional training, promote active teacher training and ensure appropriate resource allocations to it; (d) will reinforce quality, relevance and appropriate basic education for boys, girls, preadolescents and adolescents, with freedom of opinion and beliefs; (e) will deepen scientific education and extend the use of new technologies; (f) will improve public higher education quality, both university and non university, as well as technical education appropriate to our reality; (g) will build the certification and qualification mechanisms to increase public and private education institutionalization requirements and to guarantee the students’ rights; (h) will eradicate all forms of illiteracy investing in the design of policies to attend urban marginal and rural conditions; (i) will guarantee resources for educational reform, granting a minimum annual increase in the education sector budget equivalent to 0.25 % of GDP, until it reaches a global amount equivalent to 6% of GDP; (j) will re-establish physical and artistic education in schools and promote sports since childhood; (k) will foster an education evaluation and social surveillance culture with community participation; (l) will promote the education of youth and adults and labor education according to the country’s needs; (m) will foster culture to prevent drug consumption, and gang activity and juvenile violence in the school; and (n) will foster and strengthen bilingual education within an intercultural context.