A few days ago, the Ombudsman’s Office warned that the permanent reduction in educational funding is putting the right to education in Costa Rica at risk. Public spending in this sector fell from 7.8% of GDP in 2019 to 5.5% in 2025, well below the constitutional minimum of 8%. More than just a figure, this decline reveals that one of the historic pillars of Costa Rican development has ceased to be a priority.
Shortly before that, a friend from my teenage years—now an elementary school teacher—had written a comment on social media celebrating the proposal to build a megaprison in Costa Rica, inspired by the Salvadoran model. Something must be deeply distorted, I thought, for an educator to applaud a megaprisons instead of wishing for a megaschool in her community.
Around the same time, as I listened to the proposals of the presidential candidates, I found the origin of that comment: lengthy explanations about security, exemplary punishments, and tough-on-crime policies, accompanied by timid, almost decorative references to education.
There is no doubt: security and prisons have taken center stage in a grand national project, while schools and educators have become a footnote. At what point did our social project go astray and forget the central role of education?
Many specialists agree that the crisis of the 1980s marked the beginning of the structural deterioration of Costa Rican education. Cuts in public spending and a shift in the development model interrupted progress that, decades later, resulted in what has been called the “educational blackout.”
Before that decline, the country experienced something like a golden age in public education. Between 1950 and 1975, welfare policies offered real opportunities for social mobility. I belong to one of the last generations to benefit from that system, as do most of the candidates in the last presidential election. We are all children of that school system which now seems to be fading.
The most recent State of Education Report warns that the crisis not only persists but is worsening: after the blackout, learning outcomes have not recovered, and new generations are advancing with serious deficiencies in basic skills and critical thinking.
And this is not only about numbers or indicators. The philosopher Fernando Savater expressed it clearly in The Value of Educating (1997): we are born human in a biological sense, but we learn to become human through contact with those around us. Education is not a luxury or a cultural ornament; it is the process by which each generation transmits to the next the knowledge, norms, and questions that make life in common possible.
For Savater, therefore, the school should not be limited to teaching technical content or utilitarian skills. Its primary task is to form citizens capable of living together in a democratic society: people who know how to argue, listen, disagree without attacking, and assume responsibility toward others. When educational funding is reduced, it is not only programs or budgets that are cut; the very foundation of coexistence is weakened.
What would a “megaschool” look like according to Savater’s ideas and the recommendations of the State of Education Report? It would not be a gigantic building meant for political campaign display, but a well-equipped network with vibrant libraries, functional laboratories, and fairly valued teachers. Schools open to the community, where students learn arts and sciences, but also how to debate without insults, read with curiosity, care for public spaces, and understand the history that precedes them.
Prisons are necessary, but they are always a sign of a prior failure. The school, by contrast, is the attempt to prevent that failure. The megaschool would be a place of encounter designed to look outward and open paths. In its classrooms, the word “security” would not be understood as the multiplication of bars and police officers, but as the real possibility of having a life project.
In the end, the value of educating is not measured in speeches, but in what we choose to sustain with public resources. In politics, as in life, actions speak louder than words, and every budget is a declaration about the future. A country that reduces funding for its schools while imagining megaprisons does not merely address the urgencies of the present; it gradually forgets what it aspires to become.