Sarah Wagner and Gregory Wilpert interviewed Aristobulo Isturiz, Venezuela's education minister, for Venezuela Analysis. This is abridged from the full interview, available at <http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1421>.
How would you distinguish the educational philosophy of the Bolivarian government from that of previous governments? I believe that the heart of the problem is that the Venezuelan educational model has been responding to the demands, formation, and interests of the neoliberal model. Until now, they have been forming people who are deeply individualistic and competitive. There has been a marked tendency towards privatisation and exclusion.. as a result of the neoliberal policies..... a very real tendency of deterioration of public education.
Now the idea is to make a great advance in our concept of education from the formation of a primitive, individualist, and competitive being to the formation of a social and solidaristic being. The first thing President Hugo Chavez did was to take measures to [change] this tendency. The measures, among others, were to prohibit [compulsory fees] to enter a public school. He created Bolivarian schools. He created a program of school meals. And he increased the percentage of the budget dedicated to education. If you look, previously 2.8% of the GDP was designated for education and now we are above 7%. It is a progressive, sustained strong growth. And this has allowed us to expand registration and enrollment. The Bolivarian revolution is putting forth the idea of the necessity of constructing a social democracy ... When I speak of social democracy, it means to universalise the concept of rights: Not only voting, electing, being elected, public freedoms, freedom of the press, all of which are extremely important and necessary freedoms, but they are not sufficient. People have to have access to the social rights: education, healthcare, employment. Without rights, there is no democracy.
How is [people's] participation practiced in the education sector?
People have the right to participate in the planning, the executing, and in the evaluation of public policies. The communities of education are a form of participation. The civil society organisations in the schools are a form of participation. The cooperatives of the schools are a form of participation. Participation is in the debate over the curriculum.
The people form part of the state. We would not have been able to teach 1 million people to read and write if we had not had the help of 100,000 volunteers.
What is the Bolivarian educational model?
The entrance level is [preschool education], the Simoncito. Afterwards, they go on to elementary education. Elementary education is the Bolivarian school. The Bolivarian school is all-day.
It is a school that has nine characteristics. The school is a space for the community, the women get together, resolve problems, discuss problems, but at the same time it is a space for health and for life. It is a space for production and at the same time the children study, they must be capable of working with art, with crops, in the orchard, so that they go along facilitating the value of work. It is a space for creativity and inventiveness, for music, literature, poetry, painting, and dance. It is a space for the innovation pedagogy, so that the teacher has the liberty to be able to teach different didactic resources, new methodologies and strategies. It is a space for innovation. It is a space for going towards the democratisation of information technologies. They go along incorporating technology, strategies, methods, procedures. The teacher is exclusive, she or he cannot work in another place. We give the teachers 70% more than their salary so that they are there all-day and so that they don't work in another place and so that they take care of the children. Not only giving them classes, but also sharing with the children. They have time to plan, they have a library in every classroom. Each classroom has its own library so that the children do not have to buy their school supplies themselves. The children eat breakfast, lunch and dinner in the school. When the children leave the Bolivarian school, they have two alternatives. They can go to the Bolivarian high school, or they can go to a technical school, before university. The old version of schools exist and the Bolivarian schools exist. The old version of preschool exists and the Simoncitos exist. We are in a transition. What we have to do, the big challenge is to consolidate this system, to go along consolidating the system and universalising it and advancing its development.
The secondary school has changed. It is tackling the traditionally fragmented access to reality, by subject, by discipline, by course. A child jumps from one teacher in sixth grade to 12 teachers separated by subject in seventh grade. We believe this is a mistake because reality is integrated, it is not separated or fragmented or cut into pieces. Physics, maths, biology — have to do with each other. Therefore, we are moving from the fragmentation of the courses to the construction of areas of knowledge.
What are some examples of these new areas?
We are going to move from the program to the project. You elaborate an objective. And in this objective, you [learn the] different content upon looking for the solution to the project. Therefore, it is a move from program to project, from course to the construction of areas. There is an environmental centre, a centre for valuing the environment, the ecology. The concept of endogenous development, development from within — it is necessary to be conscious of this. Therefore, they are creating a laboratory of endogenous development in order that the child who comes from primary education comes with love for his home, school, teacher, family. The child, playing in elementary education will come to value work as a liberating instrument. The Bolivarian University is not just one more university. It is a guide for giving the country a new model of superior education. The small university villages are very important because they change the concept of higher education. Up until now, the university in Venezuela has been elitist. One has to go to where the university is. One has to choose a career that the university offers. The university did not have anything to do with the needs to the human resources of the regions, of the states of the municipalities. Because of this, the poor people cannot go. They cannot pay for a residence, etc. And afterwards, they have to choose a career that is offered. What is it that we are planning? That in each municipality there must exist, not one university, but instead a higher educational space, with laboratories, with technology, with administrative areas, a space that is for higher education, in agreement with the plans for each region, the region says what professionals and what technicians it needs.
What about the missions [social programs, including combating illiteracy]? How do they fit into the government's overall education policy?
The missions are a system of social inclusion. For many years, a social debt has been accumulated and we have millions of people who never in their life went to school because they are poor. And there are many who went to school, to first grade, but did not even finish sixth grade — millions. We have to enroll people in high school who never finished fifth grade. And we have thousands of high-school students who never could enroll in the university, being poor and [because of] the lack of enrollment capacity. We start off with Mission Robinson. Robinson 1 focuses on literacy, [using] TV, with VCR, with facilitators, with videos and primary books. Everyone got involved, from the president of the republic, to the most humble Venezuelan; the armed forces with boats, lamps and everything that you can imagine, walking, carrying them to the hills. We have translated [the material] into the indigenous languages and also into Braille. We taught all of the prisoners in the jails to read and write. There is not one illiterate person in jail. But we have not finished. Right now we have 1.372 million people who [have been taught to] read and write. Now we are going to graduate 30,000 more. We are going to have 1.4 million, and we have 50,000 who are [still] learning to read and write. According to the census, we had 1.5 million people who did not know how to read and write.
As part of mission Robinson 2, we have million people who are studying up until sixth grade. We are going to have the first sixth grade graduation in October; 650,000 will finish sixth grade. In Mission Ribas, high school completion, we have more than 800,000 studying. These high school students are going to finish in April.
The law of equal opportunity for women says that the education ministry must incorporate new teaching methods at the preschool level, so as to modify the socio-cultural patterns of male and female conduct, to eliminate the prejudices and sexist practices ... In what do the new teaching methods consist of and to what extent have these been implemented? The concept of gender is in the curriculum from preschool onwards. Venezuela is one of the countries that practically has educational equality. Here more women than men have a university education. In the missions it is 50-50. Notice that in Robinson ... out of the entire population of people who have learned to read and write, 67% are women and 33% are men. Women have been hopelessly trapped in a vicious circle, and therefore it is necessary to favour women.
From Green Left Weekly, May 4, 2005.
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