Schooling for twenty‐first‐century socialism: Venezuela’s Bolivarian project

Abstract

The global dominance of neoliberal policy prescriptions in recent decades has been well documented, with particular implications for educational systems. These include reduced public expenditure and provision, the promotion of individual (parental) choice, competition, increased user‐pays and the privatisation of education. Against this background, this paper reviews contemporary educational reforms in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, which are moving in a counter direction. In particular, I examine the expansion of publicly funded education, and its overtly politicised objective of preparing citizens to contribute to the Bolivarian socialist project being advanced in the country. Through this counter example, I argue that the Venezuelan case highlights the potential for substantive policy alternatives to neoliberalism into the twenty‐first century.

Keywords:

• Venezuela
• socialism
• neoliberalism
• universal education

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank colleagues in the School of Education writing group for their helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this paper, and the anonymous reviewers for important suggestions which clearly improved the final text.

Notes

1. Other countries in this centre‐left shift include: Brazil (President Lula de Silva); Paraguay (President Fernando Lugo); Uruguay (President Tabaré Vásquez); Argentina (President Cristina Fernández); Nicaragua (the return of President Daniel Ortega); and Chile (President Michel Bachelet). See Sader (2008) for a brief review.

2. Note the Ministry of Education and Sport (Ministerio de Educación y Deportes) was renamed, along with all government ministries, to include the ‘Popular Power’ nomenclature; hence the Ministry of Popular Power for Education (Ministerio de Poder Popular para la Educación).

3. Mission Robinson drew directly on the model of Cuba’s successful literacy campaign of 1961, with the materials Yo Sí Puedo (Yes I Can) being used to teach approximately 1.4 million Venezuelan adults to read and write by 2005 (see Ministerio de Educación y Deportes 2006a, 2006b). The educational missions are complemented with a range of social programs to address socio‐economic barriers to universal schooling, such as Misión Mercal providing subsidised food through a network of shops and food kitchens. In addition, Sánchez (2005) cites 400,000 scholarships being created for the poorest students (200,000 in Mission Robinson II and 100,000 each in Mission Ribas and Sucre), amounting to 70% of minimum wage ($100 per month).

4. This is based on a presentation given by Professor Luis Bigott to the author and a group of visiting academics and researchers on 9 January 2009, in the National Assembly building, Caracas. Luis Bigott is a former student and colleague of Paulo Freire, former Dean of Education at the Central University of Venezuela, and currently a deputy of the Andean Parliament.

5. While these tendencies arguably impacted negatively on students’ critical (socialist) political formation, recent work (Carnoy, Grove, and Marshall 2007) documents the success of Cuban school students in mathematics and science, relative to their counterparts in other Latin American countries. Their analysis emphasises the positive impact of what they describe as ‘state generated social capital’ (relatively low levels of socioeconomic inequality and poverty, alongside high‐quality and accessible public health care), high‐quality teacher education, and a strong alignment between teacher education and school curricula, as crucial and generalisable factors accounting for student performance. Interestingly, in terms of the critique, the authors also cite limited teacher autonomy over curriculum and pedagogy, and the suppression of student rebellion and dissent, as contributing to the relatively higher rates of performance on these standardised measures.