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This paper refers to the relationship between child work and education in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Peru. These countries aspire balanced, equitable, and sustainable development, with benefits that should be widely shared. Unfortunately, economic growth in the region has resulted too often in maldistribution of means and fruits of development between and among classes, cities and countrysides, and the indispensable natural resource base has been damaged or pilfered. Only too late is it recognized that the stability arising from a more balanced and equitable development is important for general social progress. Lack of attention to education by most Latin American governments has limited capacity to compete in the international markets, where the comparative advantages are increasingly defined by a productivity based on scientific and technological advances. As is known, the high concentration of income in this region of the world is a result of combining traditional discriminatory patterns of property with the decline of the labor market and levels of remuneration, the regressive nature of the tax structure, and the rapid impairment and elimination of social services. Social polarization has increased with the middle classes suffering heavy losses.

Abstract: This paper analyses a ‘critical moment’ in the educational trajectories of young indigenous children in Peru: the transition to primary school. It addresses the inequalities in educational services that affect indigenous children, before looking at the micro-level processes that take place in school settings, through a focus on two selected case studies from the Young Lives study of childhood poverty. Using longitudinal information collected in two consecutive years, the case studies show how the children''s language and culture are excluded from school premises and their very identity as children and indigenous people is disregarded, negatively affecting their educational performance. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]