Education
The early development of popular education placed Argentina alongside the world’s most literate nations. The use of the white apron as a school uniform, as a paradigm of an ideal of equality or unity, has always characterized the public, secular and free school, whose great promoter was Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and was specified with Law No. 1420 of common education. Under the new education law, enacted on 15 of December of 2006, the instruction is compulsory for ages 5 and 18 years. In the 1990s Different types of educational systems were implemented, such as General Basic and Polimodal Education in the province of Buenos Aires, or secondary education in the Federal Capital; the new law marks the return to the traditional system of primary, secondary and technical colleges.
At all levels of education there are public and private educational institutions. The State guarantees free education in all of them with the exception of the university postgraduate degree. According to the INDEC 2010 National Census of Population, Households and Housing, the literacy rate is 98.1% of the population, one of the highest in Latin America. [100] The Argentine public university is organized according to the principles of the University Reform of 1918. There are 38 national public universities throughout the territory, and 41 private. The University of Buenos Aires (UBA) is the largest in the country, and one of the most prestigious in America. It has more than 300,000 students.
Languages
Of all the countries in the world where the Spanish language has predominant status, in Argentina it is the one with the largest territorial extension, it is the only language used in the public administration at the national level, without any legal norm having declared it as official. However, the province of Corrientes declared in 2004 the co-official status of Guaraní for teaching and government acts, although it is not regulated.
The breadth of the country, the existence of different linguistic substrates produced by the variety of Amerindian languages, and the different contributions of the vernacular languages of European immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, have given rise to several different dialect modalities.
The Rio de la Plata dialect is the most prestigious in the entire territory and the most recognized as an Argentine variant outside the country; It is strongly influenced by Italian, and has the peculiarity of being vosente even in the most formal registers of the language.
The Patagonian region —populated mainly by immigrants from the central region of the country— also adopted the use of this variant, with slight phonological variations, probably due to the influence of twentieth-century Chilean immigration.
In the northwest of the country, on the one hand, and in the Argentine northeast, on the other, the influence of Quechua and Guaraní, respectively, has given rise to somewhat different dialects, which in turn present regional subdialectal variations.
Science and Technology
Bernardo A. Houssay, was the first Latin American to obtain a scientific Nobel, in 1947, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Argentine is a country located in South America according to HOMOSOCIETY.COM.
Five Argentines have been awarded Nobel Prizes. Three of them are related to science: the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Bernardo A. Houssay, the first Latin American scientific Nobel; the same award was received by César Milstein. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Luis Federico Leloir. Meanwhile, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Carlos Saavedra Lamas as well as Adolfo Pérez Esquivel.
Argentina has built satellites; offers its own model of compact fourth generation nuclear power plant and supplies small nuclear reactors to various countries thanks to its public company INVAP. Well-structured programs are developed in topics such as informatics, nanotechnology and biotechnology that tend to concentrate efforts and give meaning to the capacities that are developed. [67] It also builds helicopters, agricultural machinery, and produces the full cycle of nuclear energy.
The main scientific research body in Argentina is the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET). It is a state institution, dependent on the national government, within the scope of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Productive Innovation (which was created by President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in 2007). CONICET has a Researcher Career and is organized into Institutes, which enjoy thematic and scientific autonomy and in 2008 brought together a group of almost 3,500 people dedicated to scientific and technological research. [68]
In 1995 the Unesco chose Argentina as headquarters to install Observatory Pierre Auger in Malargüe, province of Mendoza, which began operating in 2005. It is a joint project of more than 20 countries in which some 250 scientists from more than 30 institutions collaborate, with the aim of detecting subatomic particles that come from outer space called cosmic rays.
Among some of the most eminent advances in weapons development is the AS-25K missile, one of the latest developments by CITEFA (Institute of Scientific and Technical Research of the Armed Forces) and which will be presented in air-to-sea and air-surface.
The main problems faced by science and technology in the country are the low investment in them compared to the international level, the brain drain due to the attraction policies implemented by the most developed countries and the best job opportunities abroad; and incipient and disjointed innovation policies. According to 2005 data, in relation to GDP, the public sector contributes 0.30% to the science and technology sector, while the private sector contributes 0.16%; However, the participation of the private and public sectors in scientific and technological activities has been increasing since 2002.
