Bolivarian education in Venezuela

[Leigh Meyers <leighcmeyers@xxxxxxxxx>]

You'll need to ignore insinuation in the title of the article that there
is something wrong with all of this...


Chavez Educates Masses at a University in His Image

By Monte Reel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, May 25, 2006; A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/24/AR2006052402444_pf.html

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'The New Man'

Alejandro Padron is like a lot of the students here: 19 years old, from
a poor family, who grew up loving sports more than books and never
really thought of his long-term prospects until faced with the drab
inevitability of a service industry job. He said he took entrance exams
for the Central University of Venezuela, and -- like most of his friends
-- didn't make it. He watched as some of those friends paid fees to take
the tests over and over, and began to resent the hopelessness of it.
College in Venezuela, he decided, was a racket only the rich could beat.

"You begin to invest in something you'll never have," he said. "Then you
realize that it's just another way to keep you enslaved."

There was no question about getting accepted at Bolivarian University,
because everyone gets in. It doesn't matter if applicants spent the past
11 years in prison for murder -- as did a 49-year-old law student who
said he is eager for a second chance -- or if they're foreign tourists
interested in social activism in Venezuela. Inclusion is the golden rule
here. So Padron enrolled last year and decided to major in politics.

But when classes started, he had second thoughts.

"My first day was frustrating, because I saw a lot of people who were
already ideologically formed -- you know, Lenin and Marx," he said. "I
was like, 'What is that? It must be a religion.' " But he soon made
friends with a tight group of young students, all frank idealists who
said they were fully committed to the Bolivarian Revolution, a model
derived from the legacy of Simon Bolivar, the South American liberator.
Whatever political commentary Padron can offer today, he said, he
learned "with the help of my comrades."

"The goal of Bolivarian University is to form 'the New Man,' " said
Padron, dropping a term coined by another revolutionary, Guevara, to
refer to someone who is selflessly dedicated to bettering society. "The
New Man is not a technocrat, but rather is proficient in various fields
-- professional and technological -- and is completely focused on his
community. He is a humanist."

Padron now immerses himself in his class readings. The Caracas campus's
library, in the basement of the main building, holds a generous
collection of political texts, the vast majority from Latin American
authors aligned with Chavez's socialist vision but with a few titles
from opposition leaders sprinkled in. Like Chavez, the library does not
demonstrate shyness in proclaiming its distaste for the U.S. government
and for the Bush administration in particular. A poster on the wall
beside the checkout counter shows a mouse with fur painted with the
stars and stripes of a U.S. flag; the mouse is caught dead in a trap.
The American author with the most titles under his name in the political
section is Michael Moore.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/24/AR2006052402444_pf.html