Learning from the Venezuelan experience
RüDIGER PUNZET
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Developing countries, with their shared colonial legacy and derivative problems, have a lot to share with and learn from each other when it comes to education.
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The scope of organisations like NAM ... need to be expanded to foster exchange and fruitful dialogue among developing countries.
Photo: AP
Effecting change: Hugo Chavez at the inauguration of a pharmaceutical laboratory in Caracas.
In matters of education and educational policy, India turns to the UK or the US. Other Western countries like France or Germany play hardly any role in this regard. The awareness among Indians about the scientific advancements in these countries does
n’t translate into an interest in pursuing higher education over there. A host of reasons can be attributed to this tendency. The primary reason is the foreign languages like French, German and Spanish, which one has to learn.
In spite of the geographical proximity of the Latin American countries to the US, very little is known in India about them and their exuberant and vibrant cultures. Only the political happenings in those countries draw the attention of the media. The recently concluded Venezuelan referendum was reported in several Indian local and national dailies. Exclusive reports appear in the international media frequently on Hugo Chávez, the President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, his television appearances — which border on clowning — and his propensity to lapse into invective. In the UN General assembly he called Bush a devil and likened the moves of the German Chancellor Angela Merkel to those of Hitler. Such events and certain undemocratic and arbitrary acts like banning channels opposed to his government tarnish the developmental measures launched by Chávez, which have met with considerable success. The Venezuelan Democracy is fraught with unbridled authoritarianism and was so even before Chávez`s accession to power in the year 1998. However, the state of human rights in Venezuela, which constantly draws criticism from the US government, seems to be better than it was in the US during the Bush regime, as the noted Latin-American expert Prof. Boeckh of Tübingen University, Germany, notes in a recent article.
The US has been politically and economically treating Latin America as its back yard. Hugo Chávez is vehemently opposed to US interference in the affairs of Latin American countries and this has earned him a lot of admiration and added a lot to his popularity. The Venezuelan government is endowed with sufficient financial resources thanks to the State-owned oil reserves and claims not only to eradicate the rampant poverty but also to eliminate its causes by enhancing access to education.
Policy of exclusion
As early as the 16th century, Spanish rulers had introduced a system of elitist school and university education with Iberian underpinnings, which excluded the indigenous people and later Afro-American social groups from the domain of education. Chávez, who is of part-European and part-Amerindian descent, considers the freeing of educational policy from the colonial influences as one of the primary aims of his government. Although Venezuela became free long time back, it hasn’t yet totally liberated itself from the structures of the colonial past. Chávez promises access to education even to the poorest of the poor in his programme of socialism for the 21st century.
The attempts to purge colonial influences from education policy have been evidenced in many former colonies in Asia and Africa. In India, for example, the movement to liberate education policy dates back to pre-independence days. Rabindranath Tagore did not like the system of education promoted by the English rulers, as it only suited their purpose of getting educated clerks to serve the Empire at a low cost. Gandhi, as early as 1909, in his response to Macaulay’s Minutes of Education (1835) observed “The foundation that Macaulay laid of education has enslaved us. (…) Is it not a sad commentary that we should have to speak of Home Rule in a foreign tongue?” (Translation of Hind Swaraj, published in the Gujarat columns of Indian Opinion, December 11 and 18, 1909). In Venezuela, indigenous languages as well as Spanish have the status of official languages. After achieving considerable success in the field of healthcare, Chávez appears to be succeeding in his attempts to revamp education policy.
Beginning with what are called “Misiones” or Missions in 1999, Chávez has fomented an incredible number of grass-roots activities among the 80 percent of Venezuela’s population that has been historically marginalised. The early and most important missions focused on education and medical help. The medical missions are generally comprised of two doctors, most of them from Cuba. The doctors are sent to rural communities and shanty towns to provide healthcare and to help people organise around their health needs. The educational missions, part of broader “barrio adentro” programmes, are composed of both national and locally trained teams which work to establish programmes to deal with illiteracy as well as getting adults and younger people back into schooling programmes to advance their careers. Neither the health nor the educational programmes are run by the Ministries of Health or Education. They, as well as additional missions involved in rural land reform, job training, etc., are funded and guided directly by national policy teams which are accountable to Hugo Chávez. Through these initiatives 1.4 million out of the total population of 25 million learned to read and write within a year and a half, while three million Venezuelans previously excluded from education due to poverty enrolled in the education system. People dwelling in slums on the outskirts of big Venezuelan cities like Caracas, Maracaibo or Valencia and the indigenous communities have benefited immensely from this measure. This has helped Venezuela surpass the goal of halving the global illiteracy rate by 2015, as set by the UN-backed Millennium Summit in 2005.
Enriching each other
Other developing countries can learn a lot from the Venezuelan experience. In the domain of education, the developing countries can enrich each other by initiating an active exchange and constructive criticism instead of looking up to the US or Europe. A continuous, critical and constructive dialogue among the developing countries is what is desired as they all share a colonial past. This experience has placed them in a better position than their colonial conquerors to solve the problems peculiar to their own countries. This common experience they share unites them with each other than it does with countries which consider themselves to be the role models for the world. Efforts in this direction have been made in the past. In India, for example, the National Adult Education Programme (NAEP) of the 1970s was inspired by the success of literacy campaigns in post-revolutionary societies like Cuba, Guinea Bissau, and Nicaragua. Paulo Freire’s concept of education dominated government policy discourses on adult education in the 1970s. Unfortunately these efforts were not sustained and strengthened. As far as India is concerned, this potential has not been optimally harnessed and a clear Western orientation is discernible in the educational policies. The co-operation among developing countries has so far been mainly in the economic sphere, like the IBSA agreement between India, South Africa and Brazil. The scope of such agreements is indeed limited and benefits only a very few countries in the developing world.
Better alternative
It would be advantageous to developing countries to learn from one another’s experience rather than just to imitate the West, which in recent times has been in the throes of moral and economic bankruptcy. A developing country has at least take to note of the various developmental measures initiated in other developing countries and try to adapt them to its conditions after testing them for their feasibility.
The developing countries have necessarily to take each other more seriously than they do at present, irrespective of their military, economic and political might. The scope of organisations like NAM (the Non-Aligned Movement), which was founded in 1955 and which has many developing countries as its member States, need to be expanded to foster exchange and fruitful dialogue among developing countries. This would pave way for the emergence of an educational union. Even the developed countries, which are always keen on establishing monetary and military unions, can benefit a lot from this move.
The author has taught German language, literature and history at various universities in Germany, Spain, Hungary and Afghanistan, and is currently working as Project Officer at the Goethe-Institut, India.
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