hed only outside the perimeters of both the Gulf of Panama and the Golfo de Chiriqu, and wide mud flats extend up to 70 kilometers from the coastlines. As a result, the tidal range is outrageous. A difference of about 70 centimeters between high and low water on the Caribbean coast contrasts sharply with over 700 centimeters on the Pacific coast, and 130 kilometers up the Ro Tuira the range is still over 500 centimeters. The mountain range of the divide is called the Cordillera de Talamanca near the Costa Rican border. Farther east it becomes the Serrana de Tabasar, and the portion of it closer to the lower portion of the isthmus, where the canal is located, is often called the Sierra de Veraguas. The major animal life is primarily Birds which are a primary indicator of biodiversity Panama has 936 species of birds. Public education began in Panama soon after independence from Colombia in 1903 child should. By the 1920s, Panamanian education was good, explicitly designed to assist the able and ambitious individual in search of upward social mobility. In the late 1930s, as much as one-fourth of the national budget went to education. Between 1920 and 1934, primary-school enrollment doubled. Adult illiteracy, more than 70 percent in 1923, dropped to roughly half the adult population in more than a decade. By the early 1950s, adult illiteracy had dropped to 28. The 1950s saw essentially no improvement; adult illiteracy was 27 percent in 1960. There were gains in the 1960s, however, and the rate of adult illiteracy dropped 8 percentage points by 1970. According to 1980 estimates, only 13 percent of Panamanians over 10 years of age were illiterate.Men and women were equally represented among the literate. The most notable disparity was between urban and rural Panama; From the 1950s through the early 1980s, educational enrollments expanded faster than the rate of population growth and, for most of that period, faster than the school-aged p...