Documento mecanografiado.

Contenido: Acknowledgments -- Abstract -- Schools, culture and perception: a Theoretical orientation -- Schooling in las Lomas -- Notes on Bolivian rural education -- The concepts of culture and cultural perception -- Schooling on the Bolivian altiplano -- Historical perspectives -- Rural public schools today -- Other education Enterprises -- Private schools and foreign involvement -- Sumary -- Contrasting hispanis and aymara views of education -- Hispanic views of education -- Aymara views of education -- Two examples to conflict -- Summary -- Aymara bases of interaction and social organization -- An introduction to the aymara way of life -- The concept of community -- Aymara social relations -- The aymara family -- The life cycle and rites of passage -- Sumary -- The Behavioral Bases of aymara perception -- Language as behavior -- Axes for behavior -- Summary -- Notes on aymara socialization -- Teaching and learning -- Games and play -- Summary -- The effects of cultural patterns and perseptions on biocultural schooling -- Bibliography.

An important part of what is learned and taught his how to define and evaluate one's universe; this is the basis of cultural perception. Cultural pereception refers to the way individual members of every society view the world and divide it into meaningful categories, and the way they discriminate among the types of sensory experiences encountered. Cultural perception affects cognition and behavior, for knowledge and experience are of necessity assimilated through perceptual filters or screens that include the criteria for distrimination and evaluation. The perceptual filters are in part, products of one's cultural heritage. Thus cultural perception yields a common basis for understanding and interaction within a society. The concept of cultural perception is important for multicultural situations, where professional educators and students may not share similar frames of perception. Schooling is such a setting tends to reflect the cultural perceptions of the dominant culture. Thus aspects of the school program may be incongruent or in conflict with traditional culture patterns of a large segment of the student population, rendering schooling ineffective.