What Should Post-Communist Cuban Schools Do?

What should education in Cuba look like after Communism? Assuming a decisive break with Communism—as happened, for example, in the Baltic States, Czech Republic, and Poland—the country will need to replace nationalization with pluralism, ill-advised pedagogy with scientific methods, and indoctrination with liberalization.

Cuban education has not been as good as the Communist state has claimed it is. Paul Peterson of Harvard’s Kennedy School has shown that the state’s claims have been too good to be true. Cuba has not participated in the PISA international comparative test. It should do so as soon as possible.

Fidel Castro nationalized the schools in 1961. Private schools—secular, Catholic and Protestant—should be returned to their owners. Under Cuba’s 1940 pre-Communist Constitution, private schools had the right to teach any subject matter using any teaching method. That right must be restored.

Currently Cuba has elite high schools, like the Lenin school in Havana, that are all too often a special privilege for children of the leading party cadres and military figures. These should be made meritocratic like the Bronx School of Science.

In 1959, the new Castro regime decreed that Cuban schools should adopt child-centered, active-learner teaching methods. (This is also called discovery-based or inquiry-based learning.) This was ill-advised. Although such practices are promoted in American teacher-training programs, they are less effective than teacher-led classrooms. Fortunately, the reality in Cuba is that existing classes are teacher-led. This should be retained. Cuba also has used exams and external indicators like grades to chart student progress. This Cuban practice is much deplored by American and British progressive educational observers, but it should be retained.

Beginning in the Literacy Campaign of 1961, Cuba has used systematic, explicit phonics to teach reading. Again, this should be retained.

In the name of Procrustean egalitarianism, Cuba has outlawed ability grouping (except at the elite schools). Yet ability grouping, if carefully done, has valid uses and should be allowed.

Cuba imposed a mathematics curriculum imported from Communist East Germany in 1974. This curriculum was similar to America’s New Math of the 1960s, emphasizing “sets” and “number systems in bases other than 10.” Not only were its math lessons riddled with Communist politics, but the New Math, to the extent it still survives, should be dropped. This approach is too abstract and doesn’t place enough emphasis on computational skills.

Cuba experimented in 2001 with entirely interdisciplinary teaching in lower secondary (grades 7-9). The same teacher taught all subjects except foreign languages, computers and the arts. Yet, in reality, having teachers who specialize in specific academic disciplines works better. This is simply applying to education the economic principle of division of labor. As in the U.S., Cuba has all-subject teachers in the elementary grades. But China has done well for its students in these grades with one teacher for language arts and a different one for math.

Cuban young people are forced to engage in public self-criticism sessions. The Pioneers and Explorers hector them about politics. Che Guevara’s ideal of a New Socialist Man is fundamentally a person who is a willing instrument of the state.

Propaganda and indoctrination are rife in Cuban lessons and need to be removed. In the “We Will Conquer” book for the 1961 Literacy Campaign, the chapter on “The Land” says “The campesinos now at last are owners of the land.” But this is quite false; the state owns all land. It doles out land to state farms, state-sponsored co-operatives, and more recently selected private farmers—all with state quotas to meet. Surplus food beyond quotas is sold at state-regulated prices.

Cuba has a variety of programs that force urban students to go to camps or schools in the countryside. These programs are ideologically related to—but less extreme than—Communist China’s Down to the Countryside Movement (1950s to 1978) or the Khmer Rouge’s 1975 forced exodus to the countryside in Cambodia. These are an effort partly to break urban students of their citified bourgeois habits and values and partly to get cheap labor in the fields. This forced rustication and conscript labor are incompatible with a free society.

When Jonathan Kozol was in Cuba, he asked some students what the definition of freedom is and did they have free speech in Cuba. They gave him robotic answers about being free from capitalistic exploitation.

Freedom is the liberty to do what you can without interference. Free speech is speech not interfered with by the government. Cuba under Communism has enjoyed neither.

In the words of a Catholic activist inside Cuba, Dagoberto Valdés Hernández, tremendous efforts have been made in the country to bring public schooling to “everyone.” That is not the problem. The problem is: Cubans are not allowed to pick “the philosophical position, the pedagogical methods, the religious orientation, or the type of school that we want for our children.” The “essential problem” of education in Cuba, Valdés writes, is not access to schooling but the absence of “pluralism” because of the “exclusively monolithic ideological character” of existing schooling. A multiplicity of school types in post-Communist Cuba will foster greater learning and free individuals.