Mariano Herrera: “Teachers at a loss” With Bolivar we go Fabrice Losego, freelance journalist, with additional reporting by the UNESCO Courier A mural depicting Cuban hero Jose Marti and Venezuela’s Simon Bolivar graces a newly opened school aimed at poor children. Handing out free meals at a new Bolivarian school in a Caracas military camp. “The project’s anti- western thesis on the ends of education goes against the notion of transmitting universal values.” Taking aim at corruption and vested interests, Venezuela’s government has launched a far-reaching education reform. Some see Cuba at the doorstep, while others applaud the will to shore up an ailing system. The Venezuelan revolution is on the march, bearing education as its torch. Since sweeping to power as president in February 1999, Hugo Chavez, a former lieutenant-colonel who led a foiled coup seven years earlier, has launched an education reform unprecedented in the country’s 200-year history. Why education? “It’s probably the most important battlefield in the process of change,” said education minister Hector Navarro recently. “You can reform the economy, but for change to be irreversible, you first have to change the citizen.” Throughout his campaign, Chavez tapped into public disaffection with the political system that has been dominated by the same two parties for 40 years. After being voted in, a new constitution was drafted. The country was renamed Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, in homage to Simon Bolivar, the 19th-century father of Venezuelan independence and one of Chavez’s foremost intellectual mentors. Then the government launched a radical shake-up of the education system, claiming it was plagued by corrupt practices and growing inequity. One of its prime targets is an “oligarchy” made up of privileged classes and the Church, whom the president accuses of robbing the poor of an education. There’s reason for concern. The marginalized formed the bedrock of Chavez’s electoral base, and they’re no minority. Twenty years ago, Venezuela boasted some of the highest quality of life indicators in Latin America. Today, it is estimated that two-thirds (14.6 million) of the population lives below the poverty line, while a further 7.5 million people (31 percent) are classified as indigent.1 Education has suffered from the crisis. Spending fell from 7.4 percent of GDP in 1983 to 3.8 percent in 1998. The primary school completion rate stands at 84 percent, lagging behind the 94 percent Latin American average. “In the last 20 years, Venezuela has gone through a transition from an ’education of castes to an education of masses,’ considerably increasing coverage and widening opportunities,” states an evaluation prepared for UNESCO. It notes, however, that “there has been a deterioration in indicators like repetition and dropout as well as in the quality and pertinence of the curriculum…Private education has been promoted as the ’channel of excellence.’” According to Abraham Zalzaman, one of the report’s authors, “the whole education system is in need of deep change. Qualitatively, it’s very weak.” Patriotic revival Against this backdrop, Chavez abolished registration fees in public schools, sent the armed forces into local communities to repair and build schools and hospitals, and launched a pilot programme aimed at underprivileged children. According to conservative estimates, the initiatives have already allowed 350,000 children to enroll (roughly 4.2 million children make up the basic school population), a figure the president has vowed to boost by the end of the year. During a visit to Venezuela in January 2001, UNESCO’s Director-General Koichiro Matsuura commended Venezuela’ “serious efforts” to promote basic education, reflected in an increase in education spending to 6 percent of GDP, well above the 3.9 percent average in developing countries. So far, out of the 20,000 primary and secondary schools in the country, nearly 2,000 have been renamed Bolivarian. Their strong points: they offer eight hours of classes per day (most schools only go half days), free meals, medical care and sports. Patriotic symbols have acquired cult status in many of them. Classrooms have their “Bolivarian corners,” where the flag, the national anthem and a portrait of the independence leader are displayed. The flag is raised every morning and children are briefed in the classroom on “Bolivarian principles,” as mandated by the new Constitution. These pilot schools give a taste of a profound attempt to reform the system, framed in the National Education Project. One of project’s chief architects is Carlos Lanz, a sociologist and former guerrilla who spent eight years in prison for taking part in the kidnapping of an American businessman in the 1970s. Lanz does not shrug off his subversive past, but affirms that “there is no relationship between the armed struggle of those times and the proposals for educational reform put forward by the current government.” The project’s ideological slant, however, is fairly blunt. The “new revolutionary education model” views globalization as a “colonialist threat … with serious implications for collective memory and national identity.” The project laments that television and computers have “imposed values” in a “subtle form of domination and colonization.” To confront this onslaught, the project advocates a school that will be “a space of cultural resistance and counter-hegemony, a place to reconquer the country’s heritage and Indo-Afro-American roots.” According to Carlos Casanova, a philosophy professor from Simon Bolivar University in Caracas, this turn represents “a loss of the western structure in Venezuelan society, and a negation of its Hispanic past.” With the aim of making the country more efficient and “building an army of patriotic Venezuelans,” secondary school students are required to follow pre-military instruction. A manual geared at 14-year-olds warns against “irrational immigration,” notably from neighbouring Colombia. There are other bones of contention. In its will to “democratize education,” the project advocates the establishment of “educational communities” to govern schools. These would extend the present system, composed of parents, teachers and the school principal, to the community at large, from local sports clubs to neighbourhood associations. The goal is for “schools to contribute to the formation of a participatory culture.” Private schools’ associations, the Church and teachers’ unions have seen red. In January 2001, some 5,000 parents and teachers marched through the streets of Caracas, the capital city, chanting “Chavez, don’t mess with my children,” and accusing the regime of indoctrinating youth in Cuban style. “The new regime is trying to ’infiltrate’ schools to get its ideological message across,” says Leonardo Carvajal, a professor from Andres Bello Catholic University, who also derides the idea of educational communities. “Each one will have its president, elected by whoever from the neighbourhood, be it the butcher, the carpenter or groups close to the regime.” Carvajal spearheaded a counter-proposal for a new education law that was presented to the National Assembly. Intellectuals are railing against attempts to rewrite history books to reflect the president’s views. “Chavez wants to erase everything that happened between Bolivar and himself,” says Guillermo Moron, a renowned historian and educator. The signature of an “integrated cooperation accord” between Venezuela and Cuba in the field of education has hardly cleared the air. In exchange for 53,000 barrels of cheap oil per day, the country that scores best in international education tests in Latin America is committed to supplying Venezuela with teacher training consultants and other services. A team of 27 Cuban “experts” was invited to conduct a “Bolivarian Literacy Campaign” throughout Venezuela, while 1,600 Venezuelan teachers have already gone to the island to study the Cuban educational model. A foundation affiliated to the Ministry of Education recently sponsored a nationwide essay contest on “Che Guevara, Example for Youth.” Teachers’ unions are fuming over Decree 1011, which would create a new echelon of senior school inspectors, armed with wide powers to recommend dismissals. The government argues they are required because entrenched supervisors turn their back on corrupt practices, while opposition politicians are concerned the decree will be used to fire teachers who “resist teaching Chavez’s anti-imperialist, anti-elitist and anti-corruption ideology.” Modernization or revolution? Some longtime educational experts insist on cutting through the rhetoric . “We’re a very long way from a second Cuba,” says Abraham Zalzaman, president of the Institute for Studies in Education Technology and Training and co-author of the UNESCO evaluation. “We’ve signed accords with Cuba as we have with Europe and the U.S. on other matters.” Opposition to Decree 1011 is hardly surprising. “It’s the first time that we’re talking about corruption,” says Zalzaman. “Private education has become more of a business than a service... If there was a supervision system in place worthy of the name, a lot of schools would be closed,” he said, referring to bribes sometimes paid to officials to get around stringent rules governing the opening of new privately run schools. Some regret that for now, the project has not focused on the nuts and bolts of learning. “It’s a partisan political project,” says Mariano Herrera, coordinator of the Centre for Cultural and Educational Investigations. “Our children need to learn how to read and write before anything else. Also, the project’s anti-western thesis on the ends of education goes against the notion of transmitting universal values and respecting other cultures.” Carlos Lanz defends the government’s position in the face of poverty and globalization. “Their mistake [referring to those opposed to the project] is neutrality. They speak like us about forming citizens, but without recognizing the conflicts, interests and power relationships inherent in society. For those people, there is neither weak nor strong, while we openly take the side of the underprivileged, the oppressed. We have to place ourselves in the context of Venezuela’s revolution, which is about anti-oligarchy and anti-imperialism. Education has to reflect these traits.” “The discourse is very aggressive,” concedes Zalzaman. “A lot of the proposed changes have been poorly presented. But there’s nothing revolutionary about the reform. It’s a push towards modernization. For the first time in 40 years, we’re starting to have a real political debate. There’s a discourse that’s going to revitalize the country and give a voice to those 84 percent who live in poverty. Of course, the middle class feels threatened.” 1. Source: Venezuela Country Profile by The Economist Intelligence Unit, 2000. Mariano Herrera*: “Teachers at a loss” What is the state of education in Venezuela? Very poor. For instance, 40 percent of youth between 15 and 24 dropped out of school even before reaching high school. There are two million young people between 10 and 24 years old who don’t go to school or have a job. But it’s not only the fault of the education system. Extreme poverty, which affects more than half the Venezuelan population, is an important factor of exclusion from school. It’s a vicious circle that has to be broken. Many observers claim that teachers are poorly trained. They’re not trained enough to teach the basics, namely reading and writing. In 1980, there was teacher-training reform. From a two-year course centred on practical problems such as working with a class of young children, we’ve shifted to a five-year university training which is much more theoretical. University mainly trains English, biology or literature teachers and plenty of civil servants specialized in planning, statistics and the economics of education. But when it comes to teaching children how to read and write, young teachers are at a loss. And students only study 900 hours a year… That’s the way it is in most Latin American countries. There are not enough schools for everyone. With the return to democracy in 1961, there was a sense of urgency and a “massive literacy plan” was launched. “Temporary” schools were built because we were lagging so far behind and had to move fast. The problem is that the provisional slowly became permanent, and now we have schools with zinc roofs in 60°C heat that are falling into ruin. To make up for the lack of schools, we invented the double-shift, whereby each school welcomes two different sets of students every day. Teachers are obliged to run from one school to another, sometimes up to three in a day, just to make a half-decent living. Why didn’t Venezuela invest more in education at the time of the oil boom? Many underdeveloped countries did the same, especially in South America. Oil suddenly made Venezuela a rich country in terms of per capita income but it stayed underdeveloped in terms of the money allocated to education. An elitist system was set up that favoured the development of universities to the detriment of primary and secondary schools. Today, the country’s universities absorb nearly half the total education budget. * General coordinator of the Centre for Cultural and Educational Investigations (Caracas).