Cuban Education and the Revolutionary Ideology

Abstract

The rapid transformation of society in revolutionary Cuba vitally involves education. The author argues that school and society are always closely linked; in pre-revolutionary Cuba, schooling helped reproduce the class structure of economy and society from one generation to the next. In Cuba today education is attempting to serve the four major objectives of the revolution: economic growth; escape from the economic, political, and cultural hegemony of the United States; attainment of an egalitarian society; and the transformation of work into a creative activity for a new socialist man. The campaign against illiteracy,the general expansion of schooling, and the extension of education to the fields and factories are among the facets of the educational program described. Professor Bowles concludes with a discussion of dilemmas in Cuban education.