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Ideas
are the essential instrument in the battle of our
species for its own survival
SPEECH GIVEN
BY FIDEL CASTRO RUZ, FIRST SECRETARY OF THE CENTRAL
COMMITTEE OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF CUBA AND
PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCILS OF STATE AND MINISTERS, AT
THE CLOSING SESSION OF THE PEDAGOGY 2003 CONGRESS IN
THE KARL MARX THEATER, FEBRUARY 7, 2003: YEAR OF THE
GLORIOUS ANNIVERSARIES OF MARTÍ AND THE MONCADA.
Translation
of the Typescript Version of the Council of State
Dear
educators from 40 countries represented here;
Distinguished
guests:
I have
always believed that education is one of the most
noble and humane tasks to which people can devote
their lives. Without it there is no science, arts,
literature; there is and would be no production or
economy, health or well being, quality of life,
recreation, self-esteem, no possibility of social
awareness.
Access
to knowledge and culture does not in itself mean the
acquisition of ethical principles; but without
knowledge and culture one cannot have access to
ethics. Lacking them, no equality or liberty is
possible. Without education and culture no democracy
is possible. (APPLAUSE)
More
than 100 years ago, José Martí categorically and
unanswerably affirmed: "To be educated is the
only way to be free."
Although
our minister referred to 23.6% illiteracy when the
Revolution triumphed in our country, given that I
was born and spent my childhood in a totally rural
area I have many memories and can testify that
there, fewer than 20% of citizens could barely read
and write, with many difficulties, and very few
reached sixth grade. There were more schools in the
city and thus a lower percentage of illiterates.
That
kind of statistical data has a highly relative
value. Inquiries as to the number of children to
have completed sixth grade at the triumph of the
Revolution reveal just a little over 400,000 persons
in a population of approximately seven million
inhabitants. And what would that sixth grade have
been like! Generally speaking, abstract figures do
not reflect realities. Thus, in that period, if you
include total and functional illiterates, over 90%
of Cubans were not educated beyond sixth grade.
I
still do not have available an exact figure for
university graduates in 1959, but I doubt it would
be much above 30,000.
After
more than four decades of struggle, day after day
and year after year, for our people’s education
and retraining — while always seeking the highest
possible quality — today, with a population in
excess of 11 million, there are very few citizens
who do not possess at least a ninth-grade education,
while the total of university graduates and
academics currently stands at 800,000. Cuba
currently occupies first place in the world —
including the most developed countries — in
various education-related indices, such the number
of teacher per capita, the number of children per
classroom and the language and mathematical
knowledge of elementary school pupils. No other
country has an advantage over us in other indices
such as school attendance and retention of
knowledge, and the percentage of pupils completing
sixth and ninth grades. In real terms, few countries
lend so much attention to the educational and
cultural training of children, adolescents and young
people.
We
would be displaying vanity, chauvinism, complacency
and immodesty if we were to say that we were
satisfied with what we have done. Our education
system still has many deficiencies and gaps. It is a
fact that there is not a single child in our
homeland without a school or a teacher — even one
lone student in the remotest areas of our mountains
— and there are no children or adolescents with
physical or mental disabilities with educational
potential lacking a special needs school within
reach. However, despite a 20-fold increase in higher
education institutes and hundreds of thousands of
boarding schools for all those requiring them, funds
always being available for education, which has been
given priority attention; the fact that we have
hundreds of thousands of professors, teachers, and
workers in the education sector — doubtless
including many of the best and most selfless,
dedicated and valuable citizens that the Revolution
possesses — we have not as yet been able to
achieve an optimum educational system.
This
can be expressed by the fact that our elementary
school pupils, who currently hold such an
outstanding place at global level, could acquire and
will acquire three times the knowledge they have
today.
It is
known that secondary education, which takes in
seventh, eighth and ninth grades, is a disaster zone
at world level. At this critical age for
adolescents, when they most need a sterling
education and the maximum attention, old concepts
born within elitist societies at a time when mass
education, now required by all nations, was not even
dreamt of, have continued to prevail.
I do
not pretend to have a monopoly on the truth, but I
do hold a profound conviction that the dominant
system is an insane one.
Super-specialization
has been imposed in those grades and at those ages.
Large groups of 25, 30 or more students are attended
to by teachers who impart their knowledge to 200 or
more pupils from various groups; they cannot even
learn their students’ names, become aware of the
family and social milieu in which they live,
establish contact with their parents, investigate
the special characteristics of each one of the
students whom they teach, nor offer differentiated
attention to any of them, given that they are all
different. Cheating is increasing and students’
final knowledge barely extends beyond 30% of the
areas established in texts, which one assumes are
drawn up with all seriousness. I should add that due
to the existence in our case, out of tradition or
excess complacency, of an exaggerated respect for
what constitutes an allegedly unique vocation for
young people, if you ask students who have completed
12th grade what they wanted to study as aspiring
teachers, their wishes never coincided and never
will coincide with the programmed needs and weekly
frequency of subjects. An invariable and eternal
result: teachers could never meet their wishes.
It
wasn’t like that in elementary education, in which
teachers move up with the same group until fourth
grade, and share subjects with one other teacher in
fifth and sixth grades.
Hence
the abrupt and total change at seventh to ninth
grade: whereas in elementary schools somebody was
looking after each child, in secondary education
everyone was looking after everyone and nobody for
anyone in particular.
And it
is not easy to approach this theme with teachers
themselves. As an alternative, we have defended the
idea of multi-discipline teachers for seventh,
eighth and ninth grades (APPLAUSE), capable of
teaching subjects at those levels, apart from
Language and Physical Education, moving up with
their students during those three years, and in a
ratio of one teacher to 15 students. (APPLAUSE).
The
idea has been and continues to be subjected to
rigorous testing. Given the need for urgent change,
we are training thousands of new teachers, selected
from 12th grade students island-wide, who are
currently devoting themselves to intensive study
with notable enthusiasm.
We are
comforted by the educational results obtained to
date. It is likewise very encouraging that many
teachers, used to working under the traditional
concept, have offered to teach classes in two, three
or more subjects, and even to work as
multi-discipline teachers. This has already led to
important advances, including a reduction of
shortages within the most frequent subjects and more
attraction to a teaching career among the intakes.
The
double session is to be rigorously instigated in
secondary education along with proper lunch
provision, starting in the capital where everything
is always more complicated.
At
senior high school level — 10th, 11th and 12th
grades — in both basic and technical education,
ideas are being drawn up that will inevitably
include a combination of specialized teachers under
the principle of differentiated attention. Nobody is
afraid that these ideas will reduce the number of
teachers or will lead to a surplus among those
currently working in secondary education; on the
contrary, it will increase the number of teachers at
all levels and, if necessary, create a reserve
which, among other things, would allow for constant
retraining within the teaching body. (APPLAUSE)
I have
invested more time on this point given its great
importance in relation to the age of highest risk
through which all children have to pass, in a
country where 100% of students pass through that
educational level. We are aspiring to increase
learning fivefold in this way.
What
has been said up until now means that I can affirm
that here in Cuba, where you have the honor of
meeting for the eighth time, a veritably profound
revolution is underway in the field of education.
This is the fruit of the need to confront 44 years
of blockade, political and economic warfare,
including more than 10 years of the special period
after the collapse of the Socialist bloc and the
disintegration of the former Soviet Union.
In the
last three years, life has led us to a great Battle
of Ideas and the need to instill a critical rather
than a self-complacent view of our work and our
historical objectives.
There
are new and higher challenges and an important
lesson. We are currently undertaking programs that
we would never even have dreamed of in our early
years as revolutionary young radicals, when we
attacked the Moncada Garrison, disembarked from the Granma
cabin cruiser and achieved victory in 1959 after 25
months of war. (APPLAUSE)
Living
for many years and accumulating that experience does
not constitute any merit in those of us who have
survived, but is rather a privilege where chance has
played a large role.
In the
time that has gone by, the world, its complexity and
its problems have greatly changed and have become
more serious. New and unimagined technologies have
likewise arisen.
It is
a fact that eradicating total illiteracy within one
year constituted a feat; doing so with functional
illiteracy inevitably took far longer. Now, with a
large human and ethical capital, a great
internationalist spirit and an elevated political
culture, any objective in education and culture,
both artistic and political, including a basic
knowledge of history, economics, humanities and
science, is within our reach.
These
compact words merely synthesize the essence of the
educational revolution that I have mentioned.
With
fabulous means of transmitting knowledge and
culture, linked to the introduction of new concepts
in the organization and improvement of the
educational system, there is nothing unusual in me
having talked to you of increasing three- four- or
even fivefold, according to the case, the knowledge
that our children, our adolescents and our young
students are receiving.
Future
developments in our education will have notable
political, social and human connotations. From my
point of view, perhaps that is the most important
aspect that I can tell you in this congress, if my
words have any value.
Today,
ideas are the essential instrument in the battle of
our species for its own survival. And ideas are born
from education. The fundamental values, including
ethical ones, are sown in this way.
Education
does not begin in the classroom, it begins from the
moment a baby is born. The first people to need a
sterling education are parents, particularly
mothers, whose nature is to bring children into the
world.
It is
essential that they, already adults and mothers, and
fathers as well, know what should be done and what
should not be done with children ranging from tone
of voice used to every detail of caring for them,
given that all those aspects affect their physical
and mental health. Among other duties, they should
never disregard feeding them properly, given that
that is decisive in the development of their
intellectual capacity during the first two or three
years of life. Otherwise they will reach
kindergarten with a mental capacity that is below
the potential with which they were born.
All
the foregoing is closely related to what is known as
non-formal education.
This
decisive system has the potential of being based on
a natural factor as extraordinary as the maternal
instinct.
Education
— let’s put it strongly — is what converts
that little animal born with the natural instincts
that rule the behavior of all living species into a
human being.
Concepts
of equality, justice, liberty and others are
relatively recent in human society. For thousands of
years slavery, exploitation, the cruelest
inequalities, abuses and crimes of every kind were
dominant. They still persist in one form or another
in the great majority of the countries of the world.
"A
better world is possible," hundreds of
thousands of academics and social leaders have
proclaimed. That better world, which depends on
various factors, is inconceivable without education.
One of
the cruelest sufferings to afflict human society —
and I mention it intentionally, for reasons that
will become clear later — is racial
discrimination. Slavery, imposed by bloodshed and
the gun on men and women uprooted from Africa,
lasted for centuries in many countries of this
hemisphere, including Cuba. Millions of Native
Indians were likewise forced to endure it.
While
science incontestably demonstrates the real equality
of human beings, discrimination persists. Even in
societies such as the Cuban one, which emerged from
a radical social revolution in which people were
able to attain full and complete legal equality and
a revolutionary level of education that cast out the
subjective component of discrimination, this
continues to exist in another form. I would describe
it as objective discrimination, a phenomenon
associated with poverty and the historic monopoly of
knowledge.
Due to
its characteristics, objective discrimination
affects black people, those of mixed race and
whites; in other words, those who historically made
up the poorest and most marginalized sectors of the
population. Although slavery was formally abolished
in our homeland 117 years ago, men and women
subjected to that abominable system continued living
for close to 75 years (up until the Revolution
triumphed) as apparently free workers in huts and
shacks in rural areas and the cities, where large
families shared one bedroom, without schools or
teachers, in the worst-paid jobs. Many very poor
white families who migrated from the rural areas to
the cities experienced a similar fate.
The
sad thing is to observe how poverty, associated with
a lack of knowledge, tends to reproduce itself.
Other sectors, mostly from very humble backgrounds,
but with better living and working conditions, were
able to take advantage of study possibilities
created by the Revolution, and now make up the bulk
of university graduates, and who likewise tend to
reproduce their improved social conditions derived
from education.
Put
more bluntly and fruit of my own observations and
reflections: having radically changed our society to
a degree that women, who previously experienced
terrible discrimination and for whom only the most
humiliating jobs were available, are today a
decisive and prestigious segment of society
constituting 65% of the country’s technical and
scientific force (APPLAUSE), well beyond the rights
and guarantees attained by all citizens of any
ethnic origin, the Revolution has not achieved the
same success in the struggle to eradicate
differences in the social and economic status of the
country’s black population, even though this
sector has an important role in many highly
significant areas, including education and health.
On the
other hand, in our search for full justice and for a
much more humane society, we have observed something
that would appear to constitute a social law: the
inversely proportional relation between knowledge
and culture and crime.
Without
going any deeper into this phenomenon, it has been
noted that the sectors of the population still
living in the marginal neighborhoods of our urban
communities, and those with less knowledge and
culture are the ones who swell the ranks of the
great majority of young prisoners, whatever their
ethnic origin. From this it can be deduced that even
in a society that is characterized as being the most
just and egalitarian in the world, certain sectors
are called on to occupy the places most in demand in
the best educational institutions, to which entry is
through one’s personal file and examinations,
where the influence of the knowledge attained by the
family nucleus is reflected, and later to take on
the most important responsibilities. But children in
other sectors with a lower index of knowledge, for
the reasons already outlined, generally drift to
educational centers that are less in demand and less
attractive, constitute the largest percentage of
those who abandon their studies at intermediate
secondary level, gain a lower number of university
places and have a high profile in the ranks of young
people imprisoned for common crimes.
Moreover,
the majority of this latter group come from broken
homes and live with their mother or their father or
neither of the two. That does not occur to the same
extent when the dissolved nucleus is of parents with
a university education or who are academics.
As
education is the instrument par excellence in the
search for equality, well being and social justice,
you can better understand why I qualify what is
currently taking place in Cuban education in search
of higher objectives as a profound revolution. It is
the total transformation of society itself, one of
whose fruits will be a general integrated culture
accessible to all citizens. More than 100 programs
are linked to those objectives which, together with
the Battle of Ideas are currently underway, and some
of them have already become promising realities.
The
very material future of our people is to be based on
knowledge and culture. In the midst of a colossal
world economic crisis, our country is advancing on
various fronts in those contexts. We are already at
the point of reducing unemployment to less than
three percent, technically speaking a country with
full employment.
More
than 100,000 young people aged 17 to 30 who were
neither studying or working are currently
enthusiastically attending courses to refresh and
extend their knowledge, and for which they receive
remuneration. (APPLAUSE)
Possibly
the boldest decision recently adopted has been that
of converting study into a form of employment, a
principle that made it possible to close down 70
sugar mills — the least efficient ones — whose
hard-currency costs were in excess of the income
they generated.
Computer
teaching begins at the kindergarten stage and
audiovisual aids are being extensively used. For the
use of those aids, solar panels, at minimal cost and
expense, supply the necessary power to 100% of rural
schools lacking electricity.
New
educational TV channels are being developed and
through them, the University for All program is
imparting language and many other courses with
growing prestige, apart from material for schools.
The
annual Book Fair now has 30 venues in the island’s
largest cities. An explosion is taking place in the
arts. Close to 12,000 young people are currently
studying in 15 Arts Teacher Training Colleges after
a rigorous selection process. Thousands of social
workers are graduating every year.
Believe
me that I have confined myself to citing very few
programs; but I should note that higher education is
no longer solely university based. Colleges are
being developed at municipal level throughout the
country for young people and workers, so that they
do not have to move to the larger cities. Almost
without us noticing it, the old concepts of higher
education have disappeared.
New
ideas and initiatives are moving ahead with
impressive force.
I don’t
know what has been explained to you during the
course of this congress, as I have not had the
privilege of participating in it due to excessive
pressure of work and unavoidable commitments in
other areas. Nonetheless, and with pleasure, I made
a mental list and quickly wrote these lines given
that the event organizers paid me the honor of
inviting me on your behalf. On writing them, I have
doubtless saved you hours of listening to a speech
(LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE), which my enthusiasm and
love for education could have generated here.
Earlier
I said that ideas were the most important resource
for saving humanity. That is not because I hold to
the idealistic belief that ideas work miracles in
their own right. They simply proliferate and
multiply in periods of crisis as a need, and precede
them like the birds that herald the arrival of
spring or winter.
The
world today is steadily being submerged in a great
and unprecedented crisis. All the bitterness you
have expressed at every encounter and are expressing
even more clearly, faced with the denial of
resources for education, the most sacred task that
humanity demands, will have its moment of
recompense, light and hope.
For
that reason, never become disheartened or forget
what I have already mentioned: "A better world
is possible." (APPLAUSE) As someone who has
lived by dreaming and, on more than one occasion,
has had the rare privilege of seeing dreams that
were never even dreamt of converted into realities,
I can assure you of that.
Thank
you very much!
(OVATION)
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