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Literacy videos reach poor in Venezuela slums, jungles
By Carol J. Williams
Los Angeles Times 6/13/04
ISLA PEDRO CAMEJO, Venezuela — In a thatch-roofed hut, two dozen barefoot adults and children, a few dogs and a monkey named Pepe cluster around the strange equipment that has arrived by canoe.
Behind the hut, which serves as the village schoolhouse, Alejandro Fernandez fires up a gas-powered generator with five or six pulls on the whipcord, then connects an extension cord to the television and VCR. The snowy display that signals no reception awes the indigenous Puinave assembly.
Teacher, handyman and rare link with the modern world, Fernandez pops in a cassette for the community's first Spanish-language instruction, which begins with a slogan from Cuban liberation hero Jose Marti: "To be cultured is to be free."
This remote island in the Orinoco River is one of the last and most isolated enclaves targeted in Venezuela's vaunted campaign against illiteracy, which in less than a year has taught 1.2 million people, from the slums to the jungles, to read and write in the national language.
By the program's end, the 36 families on Pedro Camejo should have mastered at least sixth-grade Spanish, augmenting their native Puinave and Curripaco languages, which have no written form and are little understood beyond the swift, muddy waters that surround their island.
Until the education drive, which costs $16 a month, many indigenous communities were deprived of more than knowledge. Ignorant of Spanish, the tongue of the conquistadors and now Venezuela's only official language, residents in Pedro Camejo could rarely ask for social assistance or health care when they made their way to the nearest city, Puerto Ayacucho, a two-hour drive or three-day walk.
Despite decades of disenfranchisement in a country where neither broadcasts nor ballots have been offered in anything but Spanish, many here in the crude outback of Amazonas state, Venezuela's poorest, have yet to be persuaded that learning to read and write in another language will better their lives.
(SNIP)
...most villagers are eagerly grasping the lifeline to the outside world, even if they rarely can articulate what they expect from a midlife education.
"I want to understand more," says Maria Rodriguez, whose 18-month-old son, Daniel, clings to her calf as she uses a freshly sharpened No. 2 pencil to carefully trace letters in a notebook.
(SNIP)
The program has been both praised and lambasted for the side effects of the quest to eradicate illiteracy, which stood at 9 percent nationwide when the program started but was as high as 60 percent in indigenous areas.
Opponents accuse Chavez of using the program to win favor among rural indigenous peoples, though they make up less than 2 percent of the population and are rarely politically active.
They also lament the leftist revolutionary messages embedded in the lessons from communist Cuba, which provided the televisions, VCRs and videotapes, in which Cuban teachers speak in their idiosyncratic Spanish.
Cuba has sent 12,000 volunteer teachers, doctors and trainers to Venezuela, partly to compensate Caracas for discounted oil sales that help keep Havana's economy afloat. The Cubans train program "facilitators" but don't teach.
(SNIP)
Hernan Garcia, a 44-year-old Piaroa who grows yucca, pineapple and cassava on the community's plantation, says the program has, in a few months, lifted him from illiteracy. "I didn't know how to read and write before. I knew how to plant the seeds and how to harvest the crops. Now I can also prepare the reports and the invoices," says the father of eight. Nearby, his wife, Lucila, hunkers over a workbook at a battered desk in the concrete schoolhouse illuminated by a single bulb.
Of the 60 people in the village, 40 were illiterate a year ago, community leader Miguel Garcia says. Now only three are unable to read or write, all of them elderly men who refuse to spend their evenings in a classroom after toiling all day in the fields, he says." (MORE) http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2001954987_literacy13.html----------------------------- The Education Gap
Just ten years ago, Venezuela’s illiteracy rate was nearly 9%, or about 2 million people, primarily in rural Indigenous communities and poor inner-city families. Under previous governments, students had been required to pay fees to attend public schools, which in practice excluded the most needy from receiving basic education. The most remote parts of the country had no schools at all, and government spending on public schools declined steadily throughout the 1990s. Although the country enjoyed immense oil wealth, the government – in alliance with the elites – made little effort to eradicate this plague of illiteracy and educational discrimination.
School Boom under the Chávez Administration
To meet the demand for primary education, Venezuelan leaders deployed the military to an ambitious school construction project in 2000. Within four years, more than 3000 new schools had been built. School attendance at all levels had jumped 25% by 2002, representing approximately 1.3 million students who had previously been left out of the system. During a 2001 visit to Venezuela, The Director General of the United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Koichiro Matsuura, lauded Venezuela’s education initiatives as well as its increase in education spending to 6 percent of GDP—far above the 3.9 percent average in developing countries.
Mission Robinson: Literacy for Everyone
Mission Robinson is named after Simon Rodriguez, a private tutor to Latin American liberator Simon Bolívar who often traveled under the pseudonym Samuel Robinson. The most significant campaign in Venezuela’s battle against illiteracy, Mission Robinson Today, some 100,000 educated volunteers spend evenings teaching basic reading, writing and math skills to adults in small night classes around the country. The key has been to establish night schools in virtually every corner of the nation, making them accessible to adults with families and full-time jobs. Venezuela’s state universities try to instill a renewed sense of community responsibility among their students and alumni, and college students make up the majority of mission volunteers. In its first year, more than 1 million people have graduated from Mission Robinson programs. Literacy graduates then have the opportunity to continue on to earn an elementary school equivalency with two more years of classes. (MORE) http://www.rethinkvenezuela.com/downloads/literacy.htm-------------------------------- Chavez Wins Easily
With the loyal support of members of Venezuela's impoverished majority, such as Faria, Chavez won Latin America's first referendum to recall an elected leader on Aug. 15 with a 16 percent margin of victory.
In an oil-rich country where 75 percent of the population lives below the poverty line and 65 percent of the households are run by single women, Chavez has built huge popular support with Cuban-style social-welfare missions.
There is the literacy campaign known as "Mission Robinson," through which thousands of poor people are receiving adult education. There is the free health and dental care campaign, with services provided by Cuban doctors known as "Rescuing Smiles." There have been programs that use oil proceeds to subsidize supermarkets and women's centers that attend to cases of domestic violence.
Most of the money for this populist so-called Bolivarian revolution--named after Simon Bolivar who liberated South America from Spain--comes from a $1.7 billion transfer from the state-run oil company Petroleos de Venezuela. (MORE) http://www.womensenews.org/story/the-world/040906/poor-women-gave-chavez-his-win-venezuela----------------------------- MISSION ROBINSON: IMPROVING LITERACY AND EDUCATION
In addition to poor healthcare, Venezuela has also been historically plagued by illiteracy. To address this problem, Mission Robinson was founded to equip the population with essential literacy skills. On May 23, 2003, pilot programs began in the capital city of Caracas, as well as in the heavily populated states of Vargas, Miranda and Aragua. Overwhelmingly positive results in these initial programs prompted the official inauguration of the mission on July 1st of that year. The mission has targeted Venezuelans over 15 years of age who are unable to read or write, and draws on a Cuban methodology known as Yo Si Puedo or "Yes I Can," which utilizes audiovisual equipment and local volunteers to implement the vigorous program.
The results have been tremendous; 1.5 million citizens have been taught to read and write, increasing the literacy rate in Venezuela to 96%. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has applauded Venezuela’s efforts, calling the country a leader in the region at reaching UN Millennium Development Goals for literacy. Several related missions have also been created to promote education. (MORE) http://www.veninfo.org/downloads/Social%20Missions.htm------------------------------- See Mark Weisbrot's rebuttal of Francisco Rodgriguez on the literacy issue. http://www.scribd.com/doc/2331648/An-Empty-Research-Agenda-The-Creation-of-Myths-About-Contemporary-Venezuela--------------------------------- Venezuela Declares Itself Illiteracy-Free
IPS
October 28, 2005
Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Oct 28 (IPS) - Venezuela declared itself an "illiteracy-free territory" Friday, announcing that 1.482 million adults have learned to read and write in the past two years, and that less than two percent of the population of 26 million remains illiterate.
"We are no longer poor, we are rich in knowledge," 70-year-old María Eugenia Túa, who signed up in the Mission Robinson literacy programme two years ago, proclaimed in Congress.
Túa spoke in the ceremony in which the government declared this South American oil-producing country free of illiteracy, in a session attended only by the legislators of the ruling coalition, which holds a majority in Congress.
"It is practically impossible to achieve a 100 percent literacy rate, there is always a small percentage of people we simply cannot reach, but we will not lower our guard," said Education Minister Aristóbulo Istúriz, standing next to his Cuban counterpart Luis Gómez.
Cuba provided the "Yo sí puedo" (Yes, I can) teaching method created by Cuban educator Leonela Realy, and sent instructors who trained 129,000 Venezuelan literacy tutors.
With that contingent, the government launched its literacy campaign in July 2003 with the aim of teaching one and a half million adults to read and write, and set up a programme offering incentives to those who had agreed to attend classes, ranging from baskets of staple foods to land and credit, as well as 100,000 grants of 75 dollars a month, half of the official minimum legal wage.
The people who have benefited from the literacy campaign include 70,000 indigenous people in dozens of communities, who are now literate in both Spanish and their own indigenous languages.
Special programmes were also undertaken for the blind and deaf, and for 2,000 prisoners - 10 percent of the country's prison population - while people with poor vision visited the ophthalmologist for free and more than 200,000 contact lenses were prescribed without charge.
In a ceremony with President Hugo Chávez Friday, a blind elderly woman gave a demonstration of how she had learned to read using Braille.
Mission Robinson II went into effect several months later, to enable the newly literate adults to complete primary school, and other plans were implemented later to allow hundreds of thousands of people to complete their secondary school education or enter university, with the help of monthly scholarships or grants.
The programme took its name from the pseudonym used by Simón Rodríguez (1769-1854), aka Samuel Robinson, South American independence hero Simón Bolívar's teacher and mentor.
Because Rodríguez was born on Oct. 28, that was the date chosen to proclaim the end of illiteracy in Venezuela in the ceremony in Congress.
Istúriz said the goal achieved by Venezuela is certified by the Andrés Bello educational agreement among the Andean countries, and by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).
UNESCO special envoy María Luisa Jáuregui said "we visited the classrooms and centres used in the literacy campaign in Venezuela, and it is only fair to recognise the political will and efforts made to teach one and a half million people to read and write."
UNESCO supports Venezuela's literacy goal, she said, adding that "Venezuela is the first and only country to meet the commitments adopted by the region's governments in 2002 in Havana to drastically reduce illiteracy." (MORE) http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/americas/venezuela/3558.html
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