The revolution’s education rip-off

Published by Veneconomy July 12, 2010
Health and education are two basic factors that determine a country’s capacity to move ahead along the path of development.
The Hugo Chávez administration has condemned both sectors to failure and backwardness by imposing a socio-political model based on Castro-communism.
Control over the education sector has been one of its main objectives since the start of this Castro-Chavista hegemony, and to achieve its goal it has used a variety of tactics, including changes to study programs aimed at indoctrinating children and adolescents.
The government has penetrated the entire formal education system, from the first years, with the “Simoncitos” (kindergartens), to the Bolivarian primary and secondary schools. It has set up parallel structures to the formal education system, the so-called education “missions” –Robinson, Ribas, Sucre, and Vuelvan Caras-, which not only have not managed to wipe out illiteracy but are also failing to provide Venezuela’s youngsters with the knowledge they need to meet the challenges of a globalized world.
Then there are the legal tricks that have been invented to subordinate the academic to the revolutionary, among them the elimination of evaluations in primary and secondary education and the ban on failing a pupil when he is not ready to move on to the next academic level.
On top of that, there is the penetration of Cubans throughout the public education system. More than 300 Cuban “collaborators” and some 4,544 Cuban sports technicians are engaged in indoctrination activities throughout the country.
Meanwhile, since 2005, the government has been exercising another perverse form of control over private education: the economic strangulation of private education establishments by setting maximum fees below inflation. In 2008 and 2009, the ceiling was 20% of the maximum fee charged the previous year, when cumulative inflation for the period was 67.4%. This has forced many schools to abandon some of their extracurricular activities and reduce investment in improvements in infrastructure, equipment, and technology. Only a few establishments have been able to palliate their delicate financial situation by means of donations from parents’ associations.
This year, the Ministry of Education has, once again, decided that parents’ associations will have to increase school fees for the coming academic year to a maximum of 20%, which is below inflation this year to date and a far cry from the 40% estimated for 2010.
The communist process proclaimed by Chávez is totally dog in the manger. On the one hand, the facts prove that his promise of education after the socialist model is a rip-off that will affect the future of Venezuela’s children; and on the other, it is trying to eliminate private education from the game, despite the fact that it has provided irrefutable evidence of its ability to provide excellent, quality education.