[This
article is based on a presentation by Nick Everett to an Australia-Cuba
Friendship Society (WA) public meeting on 10 March 2012.]
Today
literacy remains a global challenge. According to UNESCO, nearly 1
billion people - 26% of the world's adult population - can't read and
write. The Dakar
Framework for Action
adopted at the World Economic Forum meeting in Senegal, in 2001,
observed:
“More
than 113 million children have no access to primary education, 880
million adults are illiterate, gender discrimination continues to
permeate education systems, and the quality of learning and the
acquisition of human values and skills fall far short of the
aspirations and needs of individuals and societies.”
Illiteracy
is not just a problem in developing countries. A paper published 10
years ago by the Australian Council of Adult Literacy observed, “In
Australia today, one in five adults do not have the literacy skills
to effectively participate in everyday life.”
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| During the “Year of Education” (1961), more than a quarter of a million men, women and schoolchildren were mobilised into a teaching force that taught 707,000 Cubans how to read
|
Last
month, politicians launched the 'National Year of Reading' to
encourage Australians to read more. But ever increasing work hours –
more than 50 hours per week for one in five working Australians –
make reading for pleasure a distant childhood memory for many people
in this country. Our education system does not encourage people to
read for self-education, but rather to meet the demand for a
workforce skilled to help Australian big business compete in a
high-tech global marketplace.
For
indigenous Australians, especially those living in remote and
isolated communities, literacy rates are significantly lower than for
non-indigenous Australians. 87% of Indigenous children in regional
and remote areas struggle to read and write and fall well below the
national literacy benchmarks.
Today,
a Cuban literacy program is being piloted in the indigenous community
of Wilcannia, in western New South Wales. The program is based on a
revolutionary Cuban education method called Yo
Si Puedo!
(Yes I can), which has been trialled in numerous developing countries
including Nicaragua, East Timor and the Dominican Republic.
Jack
Beetson, the Aboriginal Adult Literacy Campaign Project Leader, told
the ABC:
"I
consider literacy is probably the most key human right that any
person can have and for people to be denied that right to become
literate is a terrible situation, in fact it's an abuse of people's
very basic human rights."
Beetson
was part of a group monitoring and evaluating the Yo
Si Puedo program
in East Timor, where, according to Beetson, “It
had something like a 98 per cent success rate of people that actually
enrolled being literate at the end of that.”
“[Yo
Si Puedo] is an adult literacy model that's been trialled around the
world and this is the first time that it's ever been trialled in
Australia,” Beetson said. "It's worked for 50 years [and] it's
just never come to Australia, to aboriginal communities.”
Beetson
is optimistic that this program will succeed where others have
failed, because of the level of community involvement.
“Wilcannia
[is] leading the way, “ he told the ABC. “I imagine that when
this is successful and when people see the rate of success of this
campaign then other communities will probably want to do it as well.”
Why
is a Cuban literacy program able to offer such hope to a remote
indigenous Australian community, or an East Timorese village, on the
either side of the world from Cuba? And conversely, why is our own
government unable to offer the assistance necessary to eliminate
illiteracy in our region, while it comes to the aid of mining
companies seeking to exploit the vast mineral and oil wealth of this
country and the neighbouring Timor Sea?
 |
| Between 2003 and 2007 Venezuela's Mission Robinson taught 3.5 million Venezuelans how to read and write using the Yo Si Puedo method
|
Cuba's
achievements in education – both at home and abroad - are
acknowledged in numerous international studies.
Back
in 2001, the World Education Forum declared “education is a human
right” and committed to achieving six Education for All (EFA) goals
and targets for every citizen and for every society. The EFA goals
included a commitment to ensuring that by 2015: all children,
particularly girls, have access to and complete free, quality primary
education; a 50 per cent improvement in levels of adult literacy; and
gender equality in education. Universal primary education was also
adopted as a United Nations Millennium Goal, in September 2000.
The
achievement of the goals was acknowledged by the UN as critical to
reducing world poverty.
Cuba's
achievements measured against the EFA goals far outstrip most
developing countries. According to UN statistics: 100 percent of
Cubans of 15-24 years of age (both boys and girls) are literate; 96.2
percent of primary school aged children are enrolled; and 92.6
percent were completing their primary education in 2004. Cuba is the
only Latin American and non-English speaking Caribbean country
considered by UNESCO to have achieved the EFA goals. In addition,
Cuba is ranked tenth out of 125 countries in adult literacy,
according to UNESCO's measurements.
Cuba
was also praised in the United Nations Children’s' Fund (UNICEF)'s
The
State of the World's Children 2005
report, for choosing to substantially cut defence spending while
preserving education expenditure in the 1990s, during a period of
financial crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union
(formerly Cuba's main trading partner). Only five countries (out of
125) exceed Cuba in public expenditure on education as a percentage
of GNP. Levels of public funding for education “are key indicators
of government commitment to the goal of education for all,”
according to UNESCO.
According
to UNESCO data, Cuba has the lowest pupil-teacher ratio of any Latin
American or Caribbean country and 100 percent of Cuba's primary
school teachers are trained. In a 2001 UNESCO study on educational
achievement in language and mathematics in 12 Latin American
countries, Cuba's results “dramatically exceeded the other
countries” to such an extreme that UNESCO had to create a unique
category for Cuba in its analysis of the results.
How
has Cuba – a nation pilloried in the Western capitalist media as a
tiny tin pot dictatorship – built an education system that far
outstrips other developing nations in its achievements?
Cuba's
contemporary education system is a product of its socialist economy,
state and society.
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| In the first five years of Nicaragua's Sandinista Revolution (1979-1984), 80,000 volunteers taught 406,000 people to read and write, reducing illiteracy from 50 percent to under 15 percent
|
In
the first six months of 1959, following the overthrow of the
US-backed Batista dictatorship, Cuba's revolutionary government:
seized the US-owned Cuban Electric Company, reducing electricity
rates for rural areas by a half; reduced housing rents by up to 50
percent; and implemented agrarian reform that limiting the amount of
land an individual could own and expropriated the rest for “people's
farms” and cooperatives. By early 1961, 75 percent of Cuban
industry and 30 percent of Cuban land were collectivised.
These
reforms were soon followed by Cuba's 1961 National Literacy Campaign,
which launched a profound change in schooling in Cuba, for both child
and adult learners. According to Carnoy, author of Educational
Reform and Social Transformation in Cuba:
“Education
and educational change in revolutionary Cuba became a symbol of the
revolution itself; mass education became a means to mass economic
participation and mobilisation... Whereas before 1959 the schools had
remained unaltered for a generation, the revolution made the
educational system into an institution of constant change and
experimentation.”
The
new government inherited an education system that was stagnant and
failing to meet the needs of Cuba's majority. Cuba's 1953 national
census (the last taken before the 1959 revolution) had revealed that,
of the population ten years or older, one quarter had never attended
school at all (over half in rural areas) and less than a quarter had
completed primary school.
Recognising
that the social transformation of Cuba would require a leap forward
in education, Fidel Castro told the United Nations General Assembly
in 1960:
“Next
year our people propose to launch an all-out offensive against
illiteracy, with the ambitious goal of teaching every illiterate
person to read and write.”
Over
a nine month period in 1961, designated the “Year of Education”,
more than a quarter of a million men, women and schoolchildren were
mobilised into a teaching force that taught 707,000 Cubans how to
read. Official illiteracy was reduced from 21 percent of the
population to 3.9 percent, the lowest rate in Latin America.
In
the midst of the literacy campaign, Cuban exiles launched the
CIA-supported Bay of Pigs invasion. Although it was discovered and
thwarted by the Cuban armed forces, escaped mercenaries combed the
countryside, harassing the peasants and their literacy teachers.
In
a country where the urban and rural poor had long been denied access
to education, literacy was empowerment. For the
counter-revolutionaries who wanted to see Cuba return to the status
quo, teaching literacy to the poor was an affront to the class order.
In the film Maestra,
released last year on the fiftieth anniversary of the literacy
brigade, a volunteer teacher recalls the threats to her host family
from gunmen who pounded on their door, demanding, “Bring out the
literacy teachers!” This family, like others across the country,
put their lives on the line to protect the teachers. Sadly, others
were not always able to escape these threats. One teacher, Manuel
Ascunce, was killed by insurgents.
The
campaign broke taboos, particularly for young women who had been
confined – up until that time – in the home. The literacy
campaign sought to overcome the divide between the urban and rural
population and build a more cohesive national identity. Two Cuban
journalists observed:
“Our
campaign... has put the youth of Cuba in direct contact, on a daily
and prolonged basis (almost a year), with the peasants and mountain
fold, the poorest and most isolated people on the island. Thus,
almost 100,000 scholars and students, aided by more than 170,000
adult volunteers, produced a very real growth in national fusion.
This experience in communal life cannot but greatly increase
understanding among the classes and strata of the population... The
Revolution no longer was a phenomenon reserved for a small group,
zealous and active; it was converted into a true mass movement.”
In
1961, Cuba's revolutionary government nationalised all private
schools and education became free and compulsory for the first time.
School enrolments and teacher numbers rapidly increased. From the
outset, mass education was seen an essential tool of popular
empowerment. Writing in 1963, in as essay entitled “Against
Bureaucratism”, Ernesto “Che” Guevara explained:
“The
revolutionary government intends to turn our country into one big
school where study and success in one's studies become a basic factor
for bettering the individual, both economically and in his moral
standing in society, to the extent of his abilities.”
The
1976 General Education Reform Law established the network of 15
Higher Pedagogical Institutes that operate in Cuba today. These
public institutions are, like all educational institutions in Cuba,
free. They offer 21 specialised teacher licences (a condition of
service in Cuba) in the fields of preschool, primary, secondary and
special education. Most students enter teacher education programs
after 12 years of primary and secondary education, while a smaller
number become technical or vocational teachers after completing
specialised secondary education at
Institutos Technologicos
(Technical Institutes).
Teacher
education programs - which include academic work, a variety of
supervised field experiences and research - take five years of
full-time study to complete. Students teachers must pass exams in
history, mathematics and Spanish, as well as an aptitude test and an
interview to determine their suitability for the teaching profession.
In
a report prepared for the World Bank, in July 2000, Lavinia Gasperini
observed that Cuba has achieved not only high levels of participation
in education, but also a high quality of education:
“The
Cuban case demonstrates that high quality education is not simply a
function of national income but of how that income is mobilised. A
highly-mobilised people can realise high quality education by
ensuring the necessary inputs, paying attention to equity, setting
and holding staff to high professional standards, and caring for the
social roles of key stakeholders-teachers, community members,
children.”
The
vast majority of Cuban youth have a say in their educations system
through voluntary, mass organisations such as the Organised Pioneer
Movement of Jose Marti (OPJM), the Federation of Middle High School
Students (FEEM) and the Union of Young Communists (UJC). Regular
student meetings, facilitated by the elected class representative,
are held in each class in every Cuban secondary school. Students
discuss and vote on everything from the food offered for lunch in a
school, to the way a particular unit of work has been presented by
the teacher. Their decisions must then be addressed by the teaching
staff. Regular, delegated national congresses of these mass
organisations formulate proposals that are taken directly to
parliament and the ministry of education.
Cubans
have, throughout the last half century, prided themselves on the
contributions their citizens have made to education and healthcare
in other post-colonial countries in Africa and Latin America, and
more recently in Asia and the South Pacific. While sometimes opposed
by professionals in the host countries, Cuban doctors and teachers
have worked in Third World conditions where many others in their
profession have been unwilling to go.
In
the 1980s, when Cuba was still a recipient of Soviet aid, Cuban
teachers participated in literacy campaigns in Nicaragua, Grenada and
newly-independent Angola. In the first five years of Nicaragua's
Sandinista Revolution (1979-1984), 80,000 volunteers taught 406,000
people to read and write, reducing illiteracy from 50 percent to
under 15 percent.
With
the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1989, Cuba entered what became
known as the “Special Period”, when resources, such as oil, spare
parts and education materials, became scarce. But despite a 45%
contraction in GNP, between 1989 and 1993, education spending was
maintained and later increased.
In
the post-Soviet era, many post-colonial nations have looked to Cuba's
example to expand their own basic education programs. Following a
radio-based literacy program in Haiti in 1999, Cuban literacy
education researchers from the Pedagogical Institute for Latin
America and the Caribbean (IPLAC) developed the literacy teaching
method, Yo
Si Puedo!
Based on the use of audiovisual instruction and a facilitator to pass
on knowledge, this unique literacy teaching method has been used in
numerous countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and the
South Pacific.
Over
the last decade, Venezuela has seen a dramatic expansion of its
education system following a literacy campaign inspired by the Cuban
example. Between 2003 and 2007 Venezuela's Mission
Robinson
taught 3.5 million Venezuelans how to read and write using the Yo
Si Puedo!
method, making Venezuela only the second country in Latin America
(after Cuba) to be declared by UNESCO to be illiteracy free.
Since
the election of President Hugo Chavez in 1998, Venezuela public
expenditure on education has increased considerably, with educational
missions providing a primary, secondary and tertiary level education
for adults. Social missions providing services such as free health
care, subsidised, state-run supermarkets and food kitchens have all
contributed to an expansion in education participation amongst poor
and marginalised sections of the population.
Venezuela's
education ministry describes Venezuela's contemporary education
system as “oriented toward the consolidation of a humanistic,
democratic, protagonistic, participatory, multi-ethnic,
pluri-cultural, pluri-lingual and inter-cultural society” and
critiques the former education system as reinforcing “fundamental
values of the capitalist system: individualism, egotism, intolerance,
consumerism and ferocious competition.”
In
Timor Leste (East Timor), Yo
Si Puedo! has
been implemented in both Portuguese and Tetum. Reflecting on the
challenges of literacy education in post-conflict Timor Leste,
University of New England academic Bob Boughton observed :
“Timor
Leste is not post-revolutionary Cuba, nor should it be forgotten that
the Cuban literacy crusade was one part of a total educational
strategy. Timor-Leste also differs greatly from Venezuela where Yo
Si Puedo!
has been deployed to greatest effect. Most importantly, Timor Leste's
illiteracy rate is among the highest in Asia, especially in the rural
areas where... 80% of the population is not only illiterate, but is
dependent on highly labour intensive subsistence agriculture to eke
out an extremely impoverished existence.”
What
can we learn from the Cuban example? Does Cuba hold the key to
overcoming illiteracy and disadvantage within Australia's indigenous
communities, or in developing countries such as our closest
neighbour, East Timor?
Initiatives
such as the pilot program now operating in Wilcannia, and East
Timor's literacy campaign, should be warmly welcomed by those of us
committed to a more just and equitable society. But in both
countries, a major shift in political, economic and social priorities
is required to achieve an equitable, just and educated society.
Here
in Australia, indigenous communities have suffered two centuries of
colonisation, political disempowerment and economic marginalisation.
Such policies continue today in the form of the Northern Territory
intervention and the state government’s attempts to offer a
monetary compensation package for an extinguishing of all native
title claims for generations to come. Indigenous people today have a
life expectancy nearly 20 years short of their white Australian
counterparts and many of their communities are living in 'fourth
world' conditions of poverty.
And
in neighbouring East Timor, people struggle to rebuild their nation
after have only in the last decade broken free of centuries of
colonialism and an Australian-backed Indonesian military occupation.
Ending
the impoverishment of these communities, and empowering them to
exercise genuine political and economic self-determination, will
require a profound and deep social transformation of the society in
which we live. Ordinary working people will need to wrestle power
from the wealthy capitalist elite that governs this country (as our
Cuban brothers and sisters did fifty years ago).
The
Cuban and Venezuelan examples demonstrate that – even in the
context of underdevelopment - not only is a massive expansion of
public education possible, but necessary to overcome the legacy of
educational inequity and exclusion that characterises most developing
countries. The massive expansion of Venezuela's education system over
the last decade, and the new values it has adopted in line with the
project of building a “21st
century socialism”, demonstrate that Cuba's achievements are not a
historic anomaly. Indeed both experiences demonstrates what a people
can achieve when they take power into their own hands.
Photos from the forum
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