– Ernesto Estévez Rams –
(Translated by NEPH from granma.cu, April 18, 2023)
All education has an indoctrination component. What makes that component valid is, first, if it is accompanied by education in the analytical ability to interpret the objective world on one’s own, and therefore the doctrines that are presented. Second, the classist purpose of that education.
As recently as April 15th of this year, in an opinion article in the Star Tribune, Tim Reardon acknowledged that in Minnesota, United States, half a million students were struggling with reading.
To give a visual idea of the problem, Tim stated that if all those people were lined up, holding hands, the line would reach from that state to Chicago, little more than the distance between Havana and Santiago de Cuba.
But the problem is not just in Minnesota. According to official figures, 66% of fourth-grade children in the United States cannot read properly, and 21% of the adult population is illiterate.
Let’s read that figure again: 21% of the adult population of the richest country on the planet is illiterate. We’re not saying it, official sources are.
The same author enlightens us with the fact that 85% of young people who face the judicial system in the United States are functionally illiterate, and 70% of prisoners do not reach the fourth grade of education.
“The relationship between educational failure and delinquency, violence and crime is cemented in problems of illiteracy,” affirms a report from the Department of Justice.
It is said, without being mentioned, that functional illiteracy and social inequality go hand in hand, but contrary to how it is usually presented, the former is not the cause of the latter, but vice versa. To think that the social solution to the problem of poverty and economic inequity is educational is ignorant, no matter how much educated people affirm it.
An old saying, which is repeatedly used, says that if you give a fish to a poor person, you feed them for a day, and if you teach them how to fish, you feed them for a lifetime. Is the adage true?
Certainly, education leads to better adaptation to life, but education per se will not change social injustice.
In this capitalist world in which we live, if you teach someone how to fish, but the bourgeoisie maintains control over the fishing gear, the educated person will end up being more profitable for the capitalist, because they will now produce more food than the owner of the fishing rod, hook and string will appropriate.
Therefore, educating is a growing imperative in an increasingly technological world, but for its hegemons, it is only imperative to educate insofar as it is functional to capitalist reproduction, in terms of having the skilled workforce it needs, and the consumer of technological advances it requires for sales.
The first case does not require mass education, but rather focused on creating technical elites; the second case does not need technologically educated people, but rather technologically addicted zombies: techno-zombies.
And the thing is, educating has an important unintended effect: the person who reads is harder to deceive and is in a better position to understand the world. And understanding the world is dangerous for the powers that control it.
Therefore, reconciling the need for educated people and avoiding the subversion of education involves controlling the educational process, in order to instrumentalize it to reproduce the system without putting it in danger.
Educational indoctrination doesn’t occur when students are taught how society functions, but rather when they are not taught.
And the truth is that all education has an indoctrination component. What makes that component valid is, first, if it is accompanied by education in the analytical ability to interpret the objective world on one’s own, and therefore the doctrines that are presented. Second, the classist purpose of that education. We already know that capitalists don’t like to be referred to as a class.
The plans for instrumentalizing university education that became predominant during the neoliberal wave, such as the then-ubiquitous Bologna Plan, which is hardly mentioned today, had as an undeclared objective to strip higher education of all universalist education and reduce it to mere professional competition.
The reduction of study time and curriculum redesign to eliminate anything that did not contribute to the “construction of capabilities” were and are mechanisms of indoctrination behind the apparent de-ideologization of studies.
In addition to this, a well-designed process was added (is being added), which, behind the so-called transnational “tuning” of curricular matrices and “internationalization” of higher education, hid (hides) the objective of systematizing brain drain, to make it more efficient.
It must be recognized that they knew how to sell the poisoned product well, and that apple has more bites than we would like.
The ideal indoctrination is to create university graduates with a narrow sense of their worldview, capable of developing impressive technological advances, but unable to understand society and analyse, with a foundation, the consequences of the advances in which they themselves are protagonists: a Copernican technoscientist and a social flat-earther.
Concerned about the social and economic consequences of Minnesota’s high functional illiteracy rate, Tim Reardon considers and argues in detail how to get out of the dead-end of having a population that cannot read.
He examines how another country tackled the problem and was able to solve it in a short time, using relatively few material resources and mobilizing everyone socially to achieve the stated goal.
In short, Tim uses the literacy campaign in Cuba as an explicit and central example of what should be done. Reardon’s reminder that Cuba is a creator of leadership, not a copycat of others’ leadership, is a good one.