Critical Education The Cuban Literacy Campaign at 50 Formal and Tacit Learning in Revolutionary Education (original) (raw)
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The Cuban Literacy Campaign at 50: Formal and Tacit Learning in Revolutionary Education
Critical Education, 2014
December 22, 2011, marked the 50th anniversary of the end of the Cuban Literacy Campaign, an initiative that dramatically increased literacy rates across the island and consolidated the presence of the revolutionary government. While Cuban schools are widely celebrated, a paucity of recent scholarship persists treating the structure and tenets, as well as the formal and tacit content of Cuban education. Beginning with an analysis of the political content of the literacy campaign, this article reviews the structure and content of Cuban education with a focus on the role of ideology. While numerous scholars have demonstrated the prescriptive and reproductive function of schooling Euro-American contexts, little comparative international work has treated the interfunction of schooling and ideology in the Global South. This article locates the literacy campaign as the formal genesis of contemporary Cuban ideology. Indeed the literacy campaign was the beginning of a discursive relationship that continues today.
The Ideological Embeddedness of Cuban Educational Schooling
2019
To increase nationwide access and tighten state controls have been two key priorities of educational policies in Cuba since the early days of the revolution. These goals were largely achieved within a decade thanks to the implementation of some bold initiatives, which in effect transformed education, ensuring swift state monopoly. However, the implementation of educational reforms also brought about several contentious debates. One of the most controversial asked why the revolution devoted so much of its political capital and resources to shakeup schooling when the national literacy rate had shown signs of considerable improvement by 1958 with scores that surpassed the world average and all Caribbean neighbors, ranking Cuba the fifth-highest in literacy in all of Latin America. Even today, the ongoing discussions about the appropriate revolutionary aptitudes among university professors signal that many questions persist about the role of education and the extent to which educational...
THE OFFSPRING OF CONTROL: THE EVOLUTION OF CUBA'S REVOLUTIONARY EDUCATION
For the 1959 Cuban revolution to prove effective, a lackluster, exclusive education system was abolished in favor of a comprehensive campaign to eradicate illiteracy. While youthful tutors and rural peasants bridged the gaps of illiteracy and social understanding within a remarkable period of three years, this campaign’s underlying intent planted the idealistic seeds required for a socialistic, revolutionary movement to take root. The effects of revolution and education for today’s Cuban youth are still being defined by a unique economic, social and political climate not yet including an autonomous embrace of observations and inquiry – cornerstones of a self-determinate society.
Guided by a Red Star: the Cuban literacy campaign and the challenge of history*.
2009
In the summer of 2000, I was invited, along with Ira Shor, to serve as an advisor for the doctoral degree program in critical pedagogy at the University of Saint Thomas (St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minnesota). I also had the good fortune to teach a summer course that same year. In those days, many of us who had been engaged since the early 1980s in the difficult task of developing critical pedagogy into a legitimate program of study in graduate schools of education, dared to be optimistic about the future of the field.
Fifty Years of Socialist Education in Revolutionary Cuba: A World-Systems Perspective
The educational achievements of revolutionary Cuba are well documented, and of international importance given the current global struggle to achieve universal primary schooling as one of the Millennium Development Goals. Revolutionary Cuba achieved and has sustained universal access to free and secular public education at all levels, with a high degree of equity, alongside a comprehensive program of adult education and the unprecedented provision of free education and training, particularly medical training, for students of the South. This paper focuses on the less well-researched aspect of the political and ideological objectives of Cuban school education, and the ways in which these have been reflected in school structures, curricula, and pedagogical practices. Acknowledging the ongoing achievements in terms of provision and academic performance, it is argued that the project of socialising new socialist citizens through schooling has been mixed. Drawing on world-systems theorising, some fundamental features of Cuba’s school system are identified that have historically worked against such outcomes. The ensuing contradictions have been exacerbated by post-Soviet social and economic conditions and changes, producing distinct outcomes in contemporary Cuban society that pose major challenges to Cuba’s political and educational project.
The adult literacy program Yo Sí Puedo has taught an estimated 5 million people, predominantly although not exclusively in the Global South, to read and write yet remarkably little has been written about these various campaigns. This research draws on the works of Paulo Freire to analyse both the seminal Cuban National Literacy Campaign of 1961 as a significant influence on YSP and the academic literature on contemporary YSP campaigns in 4 diverse settings, Bolivia, Timor Leste, Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. A Freirean framework which highlights the inter-relationships between oppression, liberation and education; dialogical and problem posing education and a specific form of conscientization within social struggle is used to analyse the YSP campaigns and draw a number of conclusions regarding how YSP can be characterised in relation both to traditional models of functional literacy and its ability to contribute to a form of critical and transformative literacy. The unique and uneven contributions of the Cuban revolution to education and international solidarity are considered within the context of the development of ALBA as an alternate pole of international cooperation that potentially offers a path away from various economic and ecological crises.
Education in Cuba: Foundations and challenges
This article discusses the importance of education for any nation and for Cuba in particular, examining its political, pedagogical and sociological foundations, and portraying its accomplishments over the last 50 years. The principles underlying the educational policy of the Cuban government are explained, as they underpin the mission of the national Education System (nES) to carry forward educational work in the country. The essay also depicts each of the subsystems that comprise the nES and ensure the fulfillment of the key educational goals: to educate the new generations and the people as a whole in a scientific conception of the world; to develop fully their intellectual, physical and spiritual skills; to promote high aesthetic tastes and feelings; and to convert communist ideological, political and moral principles into personal convictions and daily habits of conduct, with the participation of school, family and society as a whole. The essay also presents the changes that are currently being made in the Ministry of Education with the participation of administrators, principals, teachers, students and other social agents, to continuously raise the quality of its results.