Cuba’s literacy program in Bolivia – Yes they can

Telesur and many other Latin American news outlets carried the news recently that Bolivia’s campaign to wipe out illiteracy has continued making huge strides. UNESCO now classes Bolivia an illiteracy free zone as it has a literacy rate of over 96%. The socialist government of Evo Morales has made wiping out illiteracy one of its major objectives and it has made major progress since 2001 when its illiteracy rate was 14%. Now its illiteracy rate stands at 3.6%. 800,000 people have been helped to literacy since 2007 with another 120,000 set to ‘graduate’ this year.

Part of the government’s success is credited to the use of a Cuban pioneered adult education methodology making extensive use of audio-visual techniques and called ‘Yes I can’. Like other socialist governments and socialist states, Cuba made the campaign to eradicate illiteracy and to raise educational standards an absolute priority. As Theodore MacDonald’s comprehensive study of Cuba’s education system has shown the revolutionary government immediately recognised that literacy is critical to waging the battle of ideas and devote huge economic and human resources into its literacy campaign. In 1961, just two years after the revolutionary government took power, UNESCO declared Cuba illiteracy free and it continues to recognise and promote the huge educational achievements of Cuban socialism in comparison with the rest of Latin America.

Now Cuba exports not just doctors to developing states but also adult education and the ‘Yes I can’ method. Quite a contrast to Britain and the US, where big education businesses export commodified access to educational materials and for-profit provision, and where universities trade their ‘brands’ for fees in the international student markets. Cuba’s educators have helped to raise educational standards and empower the people of Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia. They are even to be found working with the indigenous communities of Australia. That’s truly revolutionary international education.

What does the passing of Gove and Willetts mean for the left?

The departure of Michael Gove and David Willetts in the recent reshuffle was a fairly obvious attempt by David Cameron to cleanse his government of some unwanted political toxicity ahead of the election. For the left and the trade union movement, it’s an opportunity to enjoy a short moment before redoubling our efforts to tackle the deeper forces at work.  

Michael Gove’s exit was, of course, particularly enjoyable. Rarely has someone united so many people against him so successfully. As Nick Wright wrote in his recent piece for the Morning Star, Gove was singularly successful in uniting almost the entire education profession against him. The government might have lived with that. But the fact is that the Blob just kept growing. By the time he went, polling evidence was showing that Gove was the most disliked politician in Britain. Quite an achievement at a time when the politician’s stock is arguably lower than at any point since the era of mass democratic politics began. Gove’s real gift was tabloid journalistic bear-baiting and he used it to try to sow division between teachers and their communities, but as anyone who knows how community state schools actually worked could have told Gove, it was going to take more than a clever turn of phrase and an acquired talent for public school-style bullying to get between parents and their daily experience of teachers. Gove’s rhetoric did not resonate with lived reality and his dictatorial centralisation of power as he tried to drive de-regulation ruthlessly from the DfE started to jar badly against basic democratic common sense.

Then of course there was the unravelling of the policies themselves. Forced academisation created broad-based coalitions based on revulsion at rank dictatorship. The huge diversion of resources to pet Free Schools, the back-of-a-fag-packet process for approving them and the drive to set them up wherever and whenever someone felt moved to run a school stank of insane dogma. And then there is the growing suspicion that academisation has been a vast folly, academically meaningless and successful only in handing schools into the control of people unfit for one reason or another to run them. It was increasingly obvious that the real enemies of promise were practising in Whitehall, not the classrooms.

Nicky Morgan’s appointment is clearly designed to take some of the personalised heat out of education policy but there will be no radical break. Indeed, as this recent article in US publication People’s World showed Gove’s particularly offensive offensive was rooted in a far longer counter-revolution that serves powerful transatlantic finance capital interests. Even while the academy chain heads and other assorted apostles of privatisation are publicly mourning Gove, they will be looking to the post-election world and working to make sure that a Tory victory will further their aims.

David Willetts’s departure had a similar motivation. Willetts was the architect of the shock therapy approach to the marketization and privatisation of higher education. Willetts attempted to resettle the financing of higher education on a publicly subsidised voucher system that would be progressively sold off to the financial sector while simultaneously feeding the growth of new private for-profit uiniversities. His policies produced student riots, occupations and Parliamentary splits in the Coalition before they began unravelling, publicly, in a very embarrassing way. As Andrew McGettigan has argued here, judged by his two stated aims, Willetts has been a failure. He leaves the higher education system more unstable, more privatised, more de-regulated and more chaotic than at any point in the post-war period. 

Yet for all the relief at the passing of the headbangers, the job at hand for the left and the education labour movement has not changed. Now is the time to take advantage of the unpopularity of the policies, as well as the people, and start to push for an alternative, democratised vision of a future education system. Most importantly, now is the time to build on the broad coalitions of interest that have emerged on campuses and in local communities all over the country. Our urgent need now is build the mass forces that can put pressure on Labour to start to develop once more a progressive vision of education. Our own suggestions for starting this process are in our pamphlet, Education for People. But this is just the start.

Education for the People reviewed in EFT

The Communist Party's pamphlet 'Education for the People' has been reviewed in Education for Tomorrow (EFT) a journal which will be familiar to many in the teaching unions. You can read EFTs review in the latest edition here.

You can download and share the pamphlet on this site here

For Democracy in Further and Higher Education

By Martin Levy.

This article was published as part of the CP's Unity Bulletin at the TUC in September 2013

 

Just a month ago Amazon boss Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post newspaper for $250 million.  Apart from the fact that all that money has come from the superexploitation of Amazon employees, does that matter to us?  It’s what he didn’t buy that is arguably more important.

The Washington Post company is still in existence, although its name will change.  But it has sold its flagship brand because it is making a lot more money from other subsidiaries, and principally from Kaplan Inc, its for-profit education company.  From relative modest origins, Kaplan has grown by aggressive marketing into a transnational corporation principally in higher education, and including some subsidiaries in Britain.  In the USA, it has faced charges of defrauding the government of hundreds of millions of dollars, by paying incentives to recruiters of students, and by lying to achieve accreditation.  Many Kaplan students have been left with no qualifications and with massive tuition fee debts that they will never pay off.

It is this market in further and higher education that the ConDem government in Britain wants to open up.  Already some of the larger FE colleges are becoming corporate groups, taking over smaller colleges and private training organisations – a prelude to full privatisation.  The government has also eased the entry of private, private equity and for-profit companies into higher education.  Just last month, BPP University College of Professional Studies, in London, became the second for-profit institution in Britain to be granted the title of university with degree-awarding powers.

If this sounds a bit analogous to the way that private companies are muscling into academy schools, then it’s not surprising.  The government is intent on privatising the whole public education system.  The process is tantamount to a massive transfer of funds to the private sector, from the public purse and from students in both FE and HE.  These private companies pay their workers less and offer worse terms and conditions than in public sector institutions, which in turn are putting pressure on their own staff as a result of the increased competition.

Education, throughout all sectors, is about the empowerment of individuals.  What is coming, if we don’t act to prevent it, is disempowerment – a narrow vocationalism with the ethos of the market, and with students as consumers who will pay throughout their lives.  We need to resist the changes, but we also need a Charter for Democratic Education, uniting the sectors, and recognising education both as a democratic equal right and as a basis for informed participation in society, as well as providing the skills needed for productive employment.  But it also needs to be democratically run and accountable to its communities, staff, students and the public who fund it.

Such an education system could only be realised within the context of an expanding, productive economy, and one not based on putting private profit first.  It therefore has to be fought for as part of the struggle for an Alternative Economic and Political Strategy (AEPS), something like the People’s Charter for Change.  By defending the current public provision, while projecting the need for a Charter for Democratic Education, we fight for the empowerment of individuals which will help to make the People’s Charter or the AEPS a reality.

Martin Levy teaches at Northumbria University,and is a branch officer and NEC member of UCU, but writes here in his capacity as a member of the Communist Party.  Further details about the proposed Charter for Democratic Education can be found in the Communist Party pamphlet, Education for the People.

Introducing 'Education for the People'

Education, we are told, is the most important thing shaping people’s futures and determining their life-chances. If you want to get a job, if you want a future at all, you have to get a good education, get into a good school, get a degree. In an era when unemployment and under-employment in low skilled jobs is becoming once again a major social reality, these messages of course wield a huge power. Policy-makers in the political mainstream argue about whether education is the key to economic success in the knowledge economy or whether it is vital in preserving the social order and preventing the kind of riots seen returning to Britain’s inner cities in 2011.

  

Yet for all the noise made about education, the reality of what is happening to our economy and our society and the reality of what is happening in our schools, colleges and universities tells a different, more complex story.

Just as the British economy is being further wrecked by austerity policies that reinforce its already deep structural weaknesses, so the education system appears increasingly incapable of delivering on either of its supposed purposes, let alone fulfilling any progressive vision. The Coalition government has returned to the policies of the Tory governments of the 1980s with a vengeance, further fragmenting the education system, fostering damaging competition, promoting the private sector and continuing the state centralisation of control over the content of education. Yet for all its aspirations to make education fulfil a dual role of rendering profits for its City friends and maintaining the social order, it cannot fully stifle the frustrations caused by its attempts to rein in democratic access to education. These aspirations and frustrations are finding expression, whether in the form of student protests or alienated urban riots.

Similarly, the idea that education can substitute for the role that redistribution and industrial policy used to perform for social democrats has been fully exploded. The financial crisis and the austerity assault, and the chronic weakness of the UK economy, coupled with the rise of high-skilled economic competitors in China and India has revealed Britain’s focus on skills at the expense of creating jobs and new industries to be an empty delusion. ‘Education, Education, Education’ was always an empty slogan, not just because it issued from the mouth of Tony Blair, but also because the fundamental idea behind it was rotten.

In this pamphlet, the Communist Party argues that it is time for the labour movement to go back to first principles about what education is, what role it plays in society and what it can be made to do to serve the working class and its allies.

We argue that the left and the labour movement needs to base its analysis on a sound understanding of the role that education plays in capitalist societies. This will enable a better  understanding of how it can be made to fulfil its potential in assisting the forces pushing toward an alternative path to socialist development.

This also means basing our immediate demands and our immediate objectives on a sound understanding of where we are now. We have to understand not just the immediate balance of class forces but also how the current conjuncture is rooted in the historical development of our education systems in the context of the development of British capitalism.

The task then is to articulate a progressive vision of what education is and should be for. This must be based on an understanding of what benefits the working class and its allies and the emancipatory role that education can play, but it must have its eye firmly on the current balance of class forces and the prevailing ‘common sense’. To repeat the old adage, we need to start from where people are, not where we would like them to be.

The Communist Party offers some proposals as to what should be at the core of a progressive education programme for the labour movement, as a contribution to an emerging debate on the broader left and in the labour movement. Our proposal is that a future progressive vision of education needs to be organically rooted to an Alternative Economic and Political Strategy. We are not in the business of dealing in utopias, but of developing an education programme that forms part of part of and reinforces the struggle for national economic and political renewal and which advances the political and economic interests of the working class in the process.

The pamphlet then goes on to make some suggestions about the form and content of an education system that could give expression to the kind of programme we set out. Too often, debate about education on the left starts from the wrong position. Too often debate is shaped by an understandably reactive response to government attacks: the need to defend this kind of school or that kind of funding pot. Instead, we are urging that the left and labour movement start from what we want education to do and begin to debate and discuss the kind of education system that could achieve this.

Finally, we argue that if the left and the labour movement are to begin to achieve any of this, then there must be a period of sustained movement building around a common programme based on the immediate needs of the hour, but which can also be seen to open up the way for further advances of a more socialist character. We offer some suggestions about the way in which a movement for education might be built.

Download the full document 'Education for the People' here