Schooling for twenty-first century socialism: Venezuela’s Bolivarian project (original) (raw)
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The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 4(1): 160-94., 2006
OPEN SOURCE - PLEASE ACCESS VIA LINK BELOW. This paper is a first approximation to the higher education (HE) reforms currently under way in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Under Hugo Chávez' presidency, free HE has become a constitutional right, implemented via the two recently created national HE programmes Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela and Misión Sucre. Based on policy documents, government reports, interviews and observation, we explore the strategic role ascribed to HE in the government's pursuance of economic, political, social and cultural transformation towards a 'Socialism of the 21st Century'. What we term 'higher education for all' (HEFA) is occurring exactly at a time when the commodification and privatisation of HE is pushed ahead on a global scale. Throughout the paper we argue that Venezuelan HE policy and practice constitute a counter-hegemonic effort to the prevalent global HE agenda.
Mass schooling for socialist transformation in Cuba and Venezuela
In contemporary contexts of Education for All and emphases on national educational performance, mass education globally continues to be strongly informed by human capital thinking, and by notions of developing future world citizens and workers for the international economy. In this paper, our central focus is on the ongoing educational project of Cuba, and more recent educational reforms in Venezuela as part of its Bolivarian Revolution, to explicitly direct mass schooling to a socialist transformation of society. Drawing on formal policy documents, international reports, and secondary research, we consider the two countries achievements on universal access and equity in schooling, as orthodox measures of a system's performance, and their policies and strategies for preparing 'new socialist citizens' who will directly contribute to and/or consolidate the social and economic transformation of society. Our major focus here is on whether and how mass schooling can prepare citizens to contribute to the construction of authentic alternatives to capitalism. We acknowledge some major tensions and contradictions in such a project, but argue that with the benefit of learning from the experience of previous socialist experiments, there are heightened opportunities for Cuba and Venezuela to make significant gains in this area, and hence to advance theorising about such a model of mass education for contemporary times.
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This article pays homage to Hugo Chavez, the former democratically elected Venezuelan leader who passed away earlier in the year. Education played an important part in his anti-colonial political strategy and Bolivarian revolution. Editorial advisory board member, Peter McLaren, a leading critical pedagogue and frequent visitor to Venezuela (he actually met and conversed with Chavez), seemed the obvious choice to write the tribute. In this article, he underlines Chavez political and educational achievements and his standing as a symbol of resistance to western imperialism.
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This article discusses the impact of neoliberal policies on the training of specialists in Public Health and describes the Venezuelan experience. In Venezuela, like other countries of the American continent, Public Health Schools had been transformed from institutions under the direction of the Ministry of Health to a model in which training took place under market conditions. Education in Public Health became a private good for individual consumption, and schools, lacking official funding, survived by offering courses in a market that did not necessarily respond to a country’s health needs. The conclusion discusses the currrent Venezuelan experience, in which the State has resumed control of the training of specialists in public health, making it more democratic, and adoptng an educational model centered around practice and whose purpose is the mass training of leadership teams to bolster the National Public Health System. In order to comment on the impact of neoliberal policies on...
After traditional academics mobilized university autonomy against government intervention and supported the coup d'état against Hugo Chávez, his government created a parallel system of public universities. María Egilda Castellano headed the effort to extend university access to poor Venezuelans. The events of her terms as vice minister of education (1999–2002) and rector of the Bolivarian University (2003–2004) and her subsequent career show the difficulty the Bolivarian government has had in creating sustainable institutions and challenge the applicability of the concept of permanent revolution to the Bolivarian process. -- Después de que los académicos tradicionales usaron la autonomía universitaria en contra de la intervención del gobierno y apoyaron el golpe de estado contra Hugo Chávez, su gobierno creó un sistema paralelo de universidades públicas. María Egilda Castellano dirigió el esfuerzo por extender el acceso a las universidades a los venezola-nos pobres. Los resultados de su trabajo como vice ministra de educación (1999–2002) y rectora de la Universidad Bolivariana (2003–2004) y su subsiguiente carrera profe-sional demuestran la dificultad que el gobierno bolivariano ha tenido para crear institu-ciones sostenibles y pone en duda la aplicabilidad del concepto de revolución permanente al proceso bolivariano.
2008
Sponsored via a highly competitive ESRC ‘1+3’ PhD Studentship (2003-2007, PTA-030-2003-00417), this transdisciplinary PhD thesis is the first socio-spatial theorisation of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) as a South-South counter-hegemonic globalisation project. Grounded in 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork, it analyses the role of the Venezuelan government’s 'higher education for all' strategy in the construction of ‘direct democracy’ and ‘participatory democracy’, identified as definitional of the envisioned ‘new’ socialism. The significance and originality of this pluri-scalar study is revealed through an analysis of processes, structural forces and political alliances among state and non-state actors involved in this multi-dimensional transformation of development geographies in Latin America-Caribbean. Key theoretically grounded concepts developed in the discussion include the ‘state-in-revolution’, the ‘transnational organised society’, and ‘pluri-scalar war of position’. This constructivist approach overcomes the state/society dichotomy that ontologically underlies much of the post-structuralist, especially the post-development literature. Download of the original thesis (University of Bristol Library scan) at: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=1&uin=uk.bl.ethos.499925
The decolonization of higher education: An analysis of Venezuela's 2009 Ley Organica de Educacion
The 2009 Ley Orgánica de Educación (the “Organic Law of Education,” hereafter “LOE”) of Venezuela is a recent foundational document that represents goals of the Bolivarian Revolution within the educational sector. Passed ten years into the administration of President Hugo Chavez, this document articulates a vision of the educational provisions for Socialism of the XXIst century. While many tenets of the law support international declarations of educational targets and development milestones, such as Education for All, democratization, national sovereignty, and indigenous rights, the mechanisms for achieving these goals are highly contested within the Venezuelan higher education community. Additionally, they counter many recommendations of Northern aid and lending organizations, which have imposed goals of privatization, decentralization, and competition upon higher education in the Global South as conditionalities of funding, yet have arguably exacerbated inequalities in beneficiary societies. The LOE embraces a radical model of educational inclusion and governance influenced by the anti-colonial principles of Venezuela’s national hero, Simon Bolivar, who serves as a symbol for national sovereignty, regional solidarity, anti-imperialism, and valorization of cultural identity. This study examines the language, provisions, and ideologies that construct the LOE through critical discourse analysis to determine how it is intended to implement the process of decolonization. Through an analytical framework of liberation theory, I link the discourse of the LOE to the societal goals of the Bolivarian Revolution including “participatory, protagonistic democracy” and national self-determination that counter the guidelines of the Washington Consensus toward education. In addition, I examine the implications it presents for redefining the nature of higher education in Venezuela in particular and in the Latin American region in general.
Venezuela Under Chávez: The Prospects and Limitations of Twenty-First Century Socialism, 1998-2009
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This article takes stock of major developments in the political economy of contemporary Venezuela after ten years under Hugo Chávez. It is argued that the Bolivarian process has done a great deal to rejuvenate the international critique of neoliberalism and to bring discussion of socialism back on the agenda of the Left. At the same time, there has been no socialist revolution in Venezuela, and Chavismo is ridden with profound and abiding contradictions. This article considers the historical backdrop of the Bolivarian process, beginning with the end of authoritarianism and the Pact of Punto Fijo and the rise and fall of orthodox neoliberalism at the end of the twentieth-century. The article then describes Chavez’ gradual and partial radicalization between 1999 and 2009 and finally concludes that the global economic crisis poses a unique set of challenges and opportunities for the Bolivarian process in the midst of significantly reduced oil revenues.