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Chapter 7 Cuba’s School to the Countryside Program Conciencia as Policy Cuba’s school to the countryside program (Escuela al Campo, EAC) mobilizes thousands of urban junior high school students each year to the countryside for approximately one month of agricultural labor, politicization, and socialization. The EAC context not only separates the children from their parents, it also places them in unknown territory and requires them to make sense of it and to carry on. Notwithstanding, the EAC was purposely created as a space in which to secure revolutionary values at a time in life—adolescence —when students are “searching for their individual identity as a person” (Ministerio de Educación [MINED] 1992, 1). The Cuban Ministry of Education, or MINED, calls the EAC “an incubator for revolutionary commitment,” instilling the revolutionary citizenship values of hard work, sacrifice, patriotism, equality, anti-imperialism, responsibility , collectivism, and solidarity with the proletariat, thus creating conciencia .The EAC presents an uncommon milieu for analyzing the ways behavioral norms and affective attachments exist in Cuban society. This chapter investigates the link between school and society, focusing specifically on the EAC and its socializing role in creating conciencia in new generations of cubanos. Cuban young people, the projected vanguard of revolutionary progress, have become ever more removed from the 1959 revolutionary triumph. As a result, major schooling initiatives have emerged to maintain or recreate the revolutionary values, fervor, and commitment necessary to sustain the hegemonic structure. The idea of the EAC was conceived based on previous successes in using mobilization to and militarization in the countryside to raise consciousness. The government knew that revolutionary consciousness “could not be devel- Cuba’s School to the Countryside Program 179 oped merely by means of propaganda or indoctrination but must arise fundamentally from revolutionary praxis” (Medin 1990, 6), such as through armed struggle or participation in mass actions and mobilizations. In the 1950s the Rebel Army in the Sierra Maestra gained the military support of the campesinos (rural farmers) by teaching them literacy skills. The 1961 Literacy Campaign followed, sending more than 100,000 urban young people, clad in olive green uniforms, to some of the most remote regions of the island to teach reading and writing and to impart a new understanding of Cuban history and its future. Conciencia resulted, not only in the emotional and axiological spheres (Fernández 2000) but also ideologically, at a cognitive level, as noted in the writings of Cuban intellectual José Antonio Portuondo (1980, 17): “The young literacy teachers discovered their country, and in a year of direct experience, of immediate contact with the oppressed of country and city, they earned their degrees as revolutionaries and were ready to effect a radical transformation in the unjust social order.” The New Left was familiar with this “bodily” process of becoming politically conscious (that is, transformative learning) and termed it “politicization” or “concientization.” Paulo Freire (1970) also calls it “concientization.” The Cubans called it “conciencia.” By 1966 the EAC had become a major part of Cuban educational policy, and all urban junior high school students were expected to spend time in the countryside. The social aims of the EAC experiment were clearly defined. It was to produce a new kind of man, imbued with love for his country, ready for reform and desirous of increasing the wealth of the community, realizing the value of labor and prizing it, honorable, devoted, and steadfast. More specifically , the aims of the EAC program were to remove the disparity between urban and rural, to establish close links between school and life, to educate the rising generation for work by actually working, and, in line with a common objective, to demand the highest possible standards while respecting the personality of the pupils (Araujo 1976, 12). The classroom curriculum in many ways prepares students for participation in the EAC program. For example, in the mathematics textbooks, word problems use the agricultural context for learning arithmetic. In the civic education textbook,1 el amor al trabajo (the love of work) is a prominent theme; young people are portrayed as heroes in different types of work, including daily life—defending la patria (the fatherland), working in construction, engaging in sports, education, and culture. One photograph shows a teenager aiming an AK-47; others show young people active in the fields. In one, Che Guevara is cutting cane.The captions to these photographs read, “The defense of the socialist patria is the greatest honor and the supreme duty of every citizen ,” “Work...

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