To transform Cuban education it is not enough to promise teachers a new set of clothes every year

To transform Cuban education it is not enough to promise teachers a new
set of clothes every year
ROLANDO LEYVA CABALLERO | Santiago de Cuba | 10 Mayo 2016 - 10:18 am.

Message on a wall: 'Revolution is love, teacher, a work of yours.'

In Cuba, those of us who teach, at any level of education, don't do it
for money. At least not primarily.

Except for a few dozen select professionals in our field, who travel
abroad on missions organized by the Ministry of Education and the
Ministry of Higher Education, most of the thousands of workers in the
educational sector scrape by on pay that, while above the minimum wage,
is not even enough to buy groceries with.

There has been an effort to address this devastating truth – surely one
of the factors preventing Cubans from receiving public, universal, free
and secular education ­– with cosmetic pedagogical experiments that have
had limited effects.

The advent of televised classes, the entrenchment of the deficient
figure of the comprehensive, general teacher at the secondary school
level; and the transfer to Havana hundreds of hundreds, even thousands
of professionals from other provinces, without forgetting the
reinstatement of retired teachers to redress the shortage of teachers in
certain territories, clearly evidence a systemic failure.

The poor results on higher education access examinations (in which I
have participated, whether grading or supervising them), and the
recurrent scandals involving payoffs related to them, are additional
signs of an undeniable moral breakdown, with an economic and financial
motivation underlying it.

Although the ministries involved insist that they are striving to
minimize the impact of the educational crisis, something is moving in
another direction. To deny the current existing educational situation is
to commit an error of assessment with serious repercussions in the short
term.

Meanwhile, other initiatives and practices, not at first as noticeable,
threaten the structural and ethical integrity of the current
sociopedagogical model and ideology, which uphold free access and
inclusion. The gradual and furtive privatization of education is a
situation to which few refer, especially with regards to education for
young adults.

I do not disparage the language teaching services of the French
Alliance, with its headquarters in Havana and another branch in Santiago
de Cuba; or even the language schools for children that have bloomed in
Vedado and Playa, which, in their way, achieve the primary objective of
equipping Cuban students with a general, comprehensive and organic
education, the very expensive aspiration of the Island's educational model.

Nor I am I averse to the almost invisible elite schools located in
Miramar: one on the Quinta Avenida, attended by the children of
diplomats and foreign businessmen, along with other privileged children;
schools whose teachers receive salaries exceeding hundreds of CUCs.

These are not something that it is necessary to vilify or condemn just
because they exist. They are an expression of today's Cuban society,
headed for a profound and radical - and perhaps irreversible - class
change, much to the dismay of the underprivileged masses.

There are kindergartens providing services for those parents who cannot
get a slot at a public nursery, or who simply decide that the best thing
for their children is a different, less collective and more personalized
kind of care, and spared from situations like a lack of water or
deficient food.

This is a time when even the Catholic Church is recapturing purviews and
roles that it wielded long ago, generating more opportunities for
indoctrination and teaching which, at least in my view, supports the
notion that the Cuban educational model is losing ground and faltering.

Something similar is happening with the practice, already
well-established at the national level, of giving gifts and bonuses to
educators, not as consensus-supported bribes, but rather as compensation
for teachers and professors in addition to their wages. It hurts, but
the truth is that certain educators succumb to the temptation to pay
particular attention to specific students: those whose parents take an
interest and go to the trouble of improving their children's chances of
receiving an education that is, at least, adequate and substantial.

The problem has to do with current educational policies and their
budgets, of course, but also with the academic/curricular design, and
the labor incentives for professionals in the teaching sphere, exhausted
by constant drudgery.

Nevertheless, there remains a traditional teaching ethic, with
historical roots, Martí-inspired, still sustained through the personal
sacrifice of thousands of teachers who every day give classes to educate
and instruct, and with all the love and dedication in the world, because
they enjoy their work and face the educational challenge with pride.

It is necessary to furnish the teaching profession with dignity, not
through a tiresome and boring repetition of its exemplary ethics, as
that shaping good men and women, but also by rewarding with justice and
material generosity teachers' daily efforts, long hours, the suicidal
tenacity they show by entering classrooms, often to receive no other
reward than a smile, often overlooked by proud children, adolescents and
adults.

To transform Cuban education it is not enough to promise teachers a set
of new clothes every year. That they never even get. Or a Dopp kit.
Which they don't get either. Or a diploma that´s not worth the paper
it´s printed on. It is necessary to pay them better, so that education
and training remain, more than a basic profession, a passion of infinite
love. Because there is no contradiction.

Source: To transform Cuban education it is not enough to promise
teachers a new set of clothes every year | Diario de Cuba -
http://www.diariodecuba.com/cuba/1462871892_22263.html