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Chapter Two. The Revolution in Education
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Chapter 2 The Revolution in Education The revolutionary government’s strategies to construct communist conciencia through political and economic restructuring had their counterpart in education . From the beginning of the revolution, Fidel Castro focused considerable attention on the matter of widespread illiteracy and on education in general. For the revolutionary government, the Literacy Campaign was understood as a fundamental act of social justice. At the same time, the campaign and subsequent education programs became vehicles for integration into and participation in the revolution, reinforcing Castro’s immediate power base, the Rebel Army, and his broader power base, the peasantry. The revolutionary Cuban educational system was designed to reinforce and reflect the new political and economic goals in an effort to construct political unity, to respond to production needs, and to transform the hearts and minds of people to become new socialist men and women. The educational efforts that followed the Literacy Campaign took on a political importance that transcended the pedagogical. The radical changes in the political and economic structure were reflected in the educational system and in a revolutionary pedagogy. The more urgent goal was to prepare the different generations for revolutionary confrontation.This goal meant that the pupil had to acquire a new conciencia, one that would adopt a conceptual and axiological worldview based on revolutionary struggle against imperialism and the forces of the past. How did revolutionary pedagogy function in the 1960s to transform the Cuban population into New Men and New Women with a communist conciencia? 42 Cuban Youth and Revolutionary Values Pre-revolutionary Education in Cuba The revolutionary educational system initiated in Cuba in 1959 bore little resemblance to the educational system that had earlier been introduced in Cuba by the United States. Cuban public education during the U.S. military occupation and under American tutelage from the early 1900s until the 1959 revolution was a paternalistic system that imposed its own set of values on a subordinate culture (Epstein 1987). Thus, the extent to which foreign intervention succeeded in expanding access to education is questionable. In 1955, the proportion of primary school–aged children enrolled in school was 51 percent, only 6 percent higher than in 1902. Moreover, the percentage of primary school–aged children enrolled in Cuban schools was lower than in all but three Latin American countries, and well below the 64 percent average for Latin America as a whole (UNESCO 1962, 146). During the pre-revolutionary years, structural obstacles and corruption plagued the Cuban educational system. Although nearly one-fifth of state expenditures went toward education in 1958, the massive outlay had little effect on primary school enrollment, inadequate school facilities, or the poor literacy rate. Prior to the revolution, 23.6 percent of the population was illiterate, including more than one million adults. However, national averages fail to disclose the uneven cultural development throughout the country. There was great disparity between literacy rates in rural and urban areas: in 1953, while the illiteracy rate in Havana province was 9.2 percent, in the less developed provinces of Oriente, Pinar del Rio, and Camagüey it was 35.3 percent, 30.8 percent, and 27.3 percent, respectively. Moreover, there was an acute deficiency of classrooms: in 1958 there were only 17,000 classrooms, whereas, according to independent estimates, approximately 35,000 were needed (Valdés 1971). The Report on Cuba, underwritten by the World Bank, describes public schooling at the beginning of the 1950s as being in a state of “disquieting deterioration ” (Paulston 1971, 379).The report notes that whereas some progress had been made toward developing secondary school education and specialized schools during the 1940s, the general trend since the late 1920s had been retrograde. Instruction had dropped from four hours a day to only two. Apathy and absenteeism prevailed among teachers. In addition, teachers were granted life tenure as government officials and received a full salary whether they taught or not. Teacher appointments were reported to be a major target of patronage, being bought and sold at high prices. Furthermore, from the mid- to the late 1940s, the minister of education stole millions of dollars from [18.212.87.137] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:22 GMT) The Revolution in Education 43 the education budget and rapidly became one of Cuba’s richest men (Paulston 1971). The Castro government’s accomplishments stand in stark contrast to the miserable state of pre-revolutionary education. In little more than a decade, the revolutionary government managed to enroll close to...