Between Permanent Revolution and Permanent Liminality: Continuity and Rupture in the Bolivarian Government's Higher Education Reform (original) (raw)
Related papers
Venezuela: Higher Education For All. The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 4(1) (2006).
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.
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.
Learning and Teaching, 2013
This article discusses paradoxes in the emergent global field of higher education as reflected in an alternative model of the university – the Bolivarian University of Venezuela (UBV) and the related higher education policy, Misión Sucre. With its credo in the applied social sciences, its commitment to popular pedagogy and its dependence on extensive fieldwork with communities, UBV offers an alternative model of science and research at the service of society. Drawing on my ongoing research on this university (since 2008), I present the difficulties which the homogenising standards of a global field of higher education pose to a rapidly developing mass public university in a semiperipheral country. I focus on the difficulty of developing evaluation procedures for UBV as this exposes contradictions which are both unique to this new university model and common for a world system of higher education.
The Discreet Charm of University Autonomy: Conflicting Legacies in the Venezuelan Student Movements
The recent history of Venezuela's student movements illustrates the paradox of academic autonomy. The student left used autonomy to resist repression during Venezuela's liberal democracy (1958). Yet, after 1998, the former supporters of the parties which had violated that autonomy started to capitalise on it in order to block the progressive reforms. The Bolivarian government's decision not to interfere with autonomous universities , but to create a parallel Bolivarian university system instead repli-cated one of the reform patterns of previous governments. Despite the government's intention to fight inequality, the reform contributed to further stratification of higher education and polarisation among the student movements.
Access for all: higher education policies in a revolutionary setting, Latin America
Since the university reform that took place in Latin America in early XX Century (Cordoba, Argentina, 1918) the expectations have been markedly oriented to the dream of access for all. This has never been possible, with the exception of Cuba, a society were schooling has been compulsory and a close ingredient of the political revolutionary project that has ruled this country since 1959. This paper deals with another country were access for all is the educational policy in higher education, Venezuela. We analyse here the alternatives policies taken by the Venezuelan Bolivarian revolution in order to achieve this goal.
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
Education as Liberation: The Bolivarian Alternative Hugo Chavez (1954-2013)
Postcolonial Directions in Education, 2013
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.