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Monday, March 15, 2004 According to Ronald Scheman, the defining moment in a career is picking a specialty. “You have to have a central passion in your life,” he advised those in attendance at the IEP Monday Seminar on March 8th. Scheman’s lengthy career in inter-American affairs reflects the value of both pieces of his advice. Raised in Brooklyn and educated during the formation of the post-war multilateral international bodies like the United Nations, he became fascinated with the role such organizations could play in a rapidly changing world. After finishing law school, he traveled to Brazil on a Fulbright scholarship, which helped shape his life-long focus on inter-American relations. “I was told [by colleagues] to vary my international experience,” Scheman confided, “but I decided I wanted to really get to know the region.” He did just that, ultimately becoming one of the most influential players in the hemisphere’s largest collaborations, including the Alliance for Progress and the creation of the Inter-American Agency for Cooperation and Development (IACD), the branch of the Organization of American States (OAS) for which he currently serves as Director General. Scheman’s most recent book, Greater America, in part reflects upon the possibilities and problems he has witnessed in inter-American relations since he began working nearly 50 years ago. During his talk, he spoke at length about the challenges facing education in Latin America and the United States, focusing on the digital divide and shifting demographics. The OAS has developed “Educational Portal of the Americas” (http://www.educoas.org), a website run by the IACD devoted to connecting the hemisphere through knowledge and educational exchange. This portal is one concrete effort towards bridging both the digital divide and the extant education gap – particularly in areas of the hemisphere where access to quality education and information has not been readily available. The site, Scheman noted, had been getting an average of 7 million hits a month, with the majority of them coming from Latin America. With Latinos now comprising the largest minority group in the US, and over $40 billion per year being remitted from the US to the south, Scheman noted that US policy-makers would be wise to pay more attention than they are to the changing economic and educational trends across the hemisphere. Ultimately, Scheman sees the answers to the toughest new questions that lie ahead as answerable only by the younger generations. “The importance of improving quality is vital,” he concluded. “Let’s get the best-practice materials and ideas to primary school teachers - and make it user friendly.” He stressed, as well, that education is becoming more “globalized” through distance education, and will likely “change the face of education as we know it,” bringing with it a host of new challenges and opportunities. Finally, Scheman recommended to students that it is not a regional focus that agencies like the OAS ultimately seek in applicants, but substantive expertise – and drive. “I was recently reviewing two applications (for a position at the OAS),” Scheman recounted to the group. “One of them was from an applicant with a Masters degree from one of the top universities in his country [Argentina]. The other was from Bolivia and had completed his Masters degree online. The motivation that this demonstrated impressed me so much that I ended up hiring him.” For more information, please visit: The next IEP Monday Seminar will be on Monday, March 22nd, with
Isabel Londono, Ed.D, the Executive Liaison for Programs at the Office
of the President of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Michael Lisman, a part-time Ed.M candidate in IEP, works at LASPAU: Academic & Professional Programs for the Americas. |