Asked what they learned at school today, most children would respond with subjects, facts or skills; few would say that they learned to take turns, follow orders, like the same television program as the coolest girl in the class or understand that only boys want to be engineers; still fewer would report having learned their place in society, their relationship with authority or a personality formed in relation to culturally contingent codes of behavior. This process of assimilation, of becoming, some would say of indoctrination, is, however, just as fundamental to their future lives as where the apostrophe goes or what makes volcanoes. The promotion of such social norms is now explicitly taught in most nations as civic or citizenship education, but their reproduction is effected through processes that extend well beyond the explicit delivery of such themes into every aspect of curriculum and the community of schools, with both conservatives and progressives having frequently posited the attainment of certain civic attitudes and behaviors as the purpose of education.
Educators, who continually bemoan the reduction of their role to the facilitation of exam success, the subjugation of professional practice to data on yet another spreadsheet, understand through experience that their work is the formation of people in society—of citizens. The modes of citizenship they work to promote are, of course, socially and culturally contingent. The assimilating purpose of education has been explicit at least since the time of Aristotle, who laid out the specifics of an education necessary for the formation of a citizen of Athens but also stated that each society would have to formulate an education that was suited to the priorities and nature of that society (Heater 2005:20 and 138). The case of Sparta, for example, was praised because its highly disciplined, punishing preparation resulted in young men able to excel in the brutal, martial, rigidly hierarchical society they were to enter (Heater 2005:8–9). Similarly, in the case of a neoliberal market democracy, an effective education system (from the perspective of secure social reproduction) would be one that encouraged trust in representatives and structures, built skills that were not tied to any specific industry and represented history as a tale of various individuals, rather than of groups contesting power relations. It is a recognizable scenario and one with which teachers of all political stamps tacitly cooperate in order to secure both their own employment and the societally specific success of their learners.
The perennial debate between progressive educators attempting to develop humans as subjects and conservative educators promoting the transfer of apolitical knowledge is a disingenuous distraction. As argued by Paulo Freire and others:
The choices available are not whether or not ideology should be taught but which ideology and how that teaching should be effected. Where such choices are seen as belonging peculiarly to teachers, however, there is a glaring failure to problematize the state as an ideological actor, presenting it as a constant, neutral framework for political and social issues, rather than an interested agent in their genesis.There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. (Shaull 2014:34)
Different states take different approaches to this question: some ideologize directly, promoting a totalizing truth and prohibiting discussion of other perspectives; others, particularly neoliberal states, eschew the explicit promotion of an ideology but reinforce one through everyday practice, the omission of challenging perspectives and the naturalizing of extant social relations, until the possibility of alternatives is effectively obliterated. There is, of course, an alternative term for such stifling consensus, and that is hegemony: the mechanisms by which ideology is neutralized and assimilated to such an extent that it appears natural and seamless, characterized in Antonio Gramsci’s works as ‘the seemingly willing participation by subaltern groups in their own domination’ (McLaren et al. 2002:156).
As has been described by Michael Apple (2006), the contemporary focus on tangible, auditable educational outcomes, while it may appear because of its ‘objectivity’ to be a de-ideologizing move, in fact works to reinforce the inherently ideological perception of people as individual units of success and failure in perpetual competition. Making education about nothing that cannot be counted does not remove the ideological element; rather, it entrenches it, removing young people’s vision of themselves as anything more than that which can be counted.
In this context, we educators need to keep continually in view the tension between our role of enabling young people to succeed in society and our role in reproducing its limits and inequalities. We need to question what the ideology is that we are teaching and whether it is more or less harmful to do so implicitly or explicitly. And, by and large, we do question all of these things and seek to humanize education and ameliorate the deterministic roles set for our students where we can.
The less-asked question, however, is whether education can work not simply to reproduce society to a greater or lesser degree but rather to produce it; whether it can create citizens able to share a social purpose and reimagine reality. It is a question addressed in this book through the examination of education and citizen formation in a country that has spent the last 50 years trying to do just that.
Cuba is a fitting crucible for the examination of these issues for a variety of reasons. Firstly, its government has, since the Revolution of 1959, put the socializing and ideologizing function of education at the heart of all policy. In addition, it runs counter to global trends not only in the ideological model it seeks to promote through education, but also in its unapologetic decision to continue doing so directly and explicitly. The decision, moreover, to make education a resource priority means that its system yields tangible outcomes comparable with those of ‘developed’ neoliberal economies.
This is not a comparative study. While it is my hope that the Cuban experience will shed light on the issues raised above for all of us, the story is definitively that of Cuban youth and Cuban education. It is a story that many of those who take an interest in Cuba think they know by heart. It is a story, however, that perhaps needs to be retold.
When enumerating the successes of the Cuban revolutionary project, the two elements that spring most predictably to mind are always health and education. The government’s consistent focus on ensuring universal, high-quality, free education and healthcare has endured half a century of economic and policy reversals, and these ‘social gains’ are widely regarded as the reason that the Revolution has maintained legitimacy within Cuba in spite of international isolation and internal controls. The concrete outcomes of the emphasis on education are easy to identify: full literacy; continent-leading school results; a meteoric rise in university matriculation, with numbers increasing ‘77-fold between 1958 and 1990’ (Eckstein 1997:109); and a student–teacher ratio of just 10:1 (Damon and Glewwe 2009).
It is notable, then, that the acknowledged importance of the education system to Cuba’s Revolution is not reflected internationally in a significant output of academic work examining that system. Since the initial interest of the 1960s gave rise to touchstone works, such as those of Richard Fagen (1969) and Arthur Gillette (1972), publications have been scant and, where they have existed, have tended either to offer uncritical paeans (Macdonald 2009; Wald 1978) or demonizations of state control and indoctrination (Cruz-Taura 2003; Bunck 1994). These polarized approaches inhibit either meaningful criticism of Cuban education or the possibility that international educators can learn from its successes. Recent years have seen the publication of at least two serious studies, with Martin Carnoy’s Cuba’s Academic Advantage: Why Students in Cuba Do Better in School (2007) attempting to dissect the causes of the country’s notably high results, particularly in literacy and numeracy, while Denise Blum’s Cuban Youth and Revolutionary Values: Educating the New Socialist Citizen (2011) begins to assess the effectiveness of values education in schools. Blum’s anthropological study, based largely on observations undertaken within a secondary school in a marginalized barrio (neighborhood) of Havana, pays particular attention to the ethos and character of Cuban schooling. She emphasizes the affective relationships between students and teachers and highlights the importance of extracurricular activities, the Pioneers Mass Organization for school children and the continuing emphasis on labor education as methods of engendering and developing collective and solidary values.
This study seeks to build on Blum’s work by addressing areas relatively untouched by her study: the content and function of the curricula and texts designed to engender revolutionary values, and the effectiveness and relevance of this citizenship training in maintaining revolutionary values and behaviors as young Cubans leave schooling and begin to insert themselves into adult societal roles. It does this by focusing on the developing experiences of a specific generation and tracing the relationship between their emergent personal, generational and social identities and taught ideological norms. By concentrating on this generation and taking a broadly chronological approach—delineating their schooling, experiences of post-school educational and social projects, and then transition into work, political participation and parenthood—I attempt to re-present the values promoted through education not as fetishized absolutes, but rather as basic and inherently valuable tools for negotiating and developing Cuban society, which are sustained, jettisoned and modified in relation to the country’s changing reality. This work places the experiences and testimonies of young people center-stage, endeavoring thereby to shift discourse from its emphasis on abstract objects (values) to subjects (the people upon whom those values are inculcated).
The generation selected for this focus is uniquely fitted to the aims of a study seeking to identify the relationships between static value systems and shifting social and economic realities. Now (2014) aged between 21 and 34, all passed at least part of their compulsory education in the decade following the collapse of socialism in Europe, a period recognized as certainly the most economically challenging, and arguably also the most politically and socially challenging, experienced by Cubans since 1959. Equally significantly, they were all aged between 14 and 21 at some point between the years 2000 and 2008, years in which, under the Battle of Ideas, the values and engagement of youth were the explicit and targeted priorities of government policies and programs. Finally, as they move now into the full responsibilities of adulthood, it is inevitable that they will be the first generation of Cubans since the ‘Triumph of the Revolution’ to experience and influence a government no longer directed (for reasons of age and mortality) by the heroes of the Sierra Maestra guerrilla struggle: the generación del centenario superseded by the generación del milenio. 1
The baton is passed, however, to a generation about which the hopes of Cubans are not always sanguine. There is widespread concern that the changes to education brought about by the crisis of the 1990s and the social programs of the 2000s have damaged Cuba’s still notable but previously unassailable record on educational attainment, leading to lower levels of academic and cultural capacities. The fears are, however, less practical than moral, reflecting a narrative of degenerating values and political commitment.
Gustavo Torroella’s 1963 investigation of the values and priorities of young Cubans, conducted as part of a global study of youth by the United Nations, surveyed 581 young people between 16 and 23, and the results were, for the nascent Revolution, more than gratifying. Two years on from the 1961 ‘Year of Education’, Torroella found that the values espoused by young Cubans were, in great part, altruistic and based on a collectivist outlook; their hopes for the future prioritized social change and conceived that change as both communist and progressive; their professional ambitions were also geared toward public service, with teaching and medicine the most popular choices; there was, most importantly, a palpable sense of optimism and positivity, with 89% of 16- to 18-year-olds and 92% of 19- to 23-year-olds saying they would rather live now than at any other point in history (Torroella 1963:81).
That blooming generation is now old and its infant Revolution is, perhaps, reaching middle age. In the intervening years, the Revolution formed by that generation has created and nurtured an education system designed to reproduce its values and, thereby, its social and political structures. In the context of the new challenges faced by Cuba and of the young generation causing their parents and grandparents such concern, this work offers an assessment of the extent to which Cuban education has been successful in its aims, firstly, of reproducing those values and, secondly, of creating a generation willing and able to use those values to continue making the Revolution in the new century. It does these using three key sets of resources:
Educational Texts
To analyze the effectiveness of ideological and citizenship education, it is first necessary to understand in detail the aims and content of that education. Contextualized against academic readings of Cuban ideology (drawing in particular on Antoni Kapcia’s conception of cubanía revolucionaria), Ministry of Education guidelines and the dissertations and theses of practicing teachers, I undertake a close textual analysis of the textbooks used for the teaching of civic education and Cuban history in use when the focus generation were at school. My interpretation highlights the selection of themes and rhetorical techniques and reads them in the light of the historical circumstances and reflective comments of young people.
Endogenous Cuban Scholarship
Given the paucity of available international materials and the serious and ongoing reflection on the themes of education and ideological training within Cuba, a critical foundation in the interpretations of values education and youth development expounded by Cuban experts is required. Material used for this book falls broadly into three areas: firstly, internal assessments of the successes, failures and trajectory of values education, sourced primarily through Ministry of Education documentation centers and the records of the biennial Pedagogía education conference; secondly, social science studies on youth programs and identity, predominantly those produced by the Centre for Youth Studies (CESJ) and Centre for Psychological and Sociological Research (CIPS); and, finally, 32 interviews conducted for this study with a selection of Cuban experts, rangin...