The Bolivarian Revolution and Student Youth

The Venezuelan education system is being transformed under the impact of the Bolivarian revolution. Now, Hands Off Venezuela has organised the first speaking tour of a Venezuelan student activist in Britain so that we can get a first hand account of this exciting transformation.

Before Chávez came to power in Venezuela, the country's educational system was "responding to the demands, formation, and interests of the neo-liberal model ... forming people who are deeply individualistic and competitive...in an educational structure that is profoundly elitist and exclusive."  Sounds familiar, doesn't it?  Venezuela's Minister of Education and Sports Aristóbulo Isturiz's words could be describing the educational systems, and particularly university systems, of just about anywhere, including Britain.  In Venezuela, as elsewhere, poor students simply could not afford higher education that didn't want them to take part anyway.  Things have changed. The Bolivarian University of Venezuela (UBV), occupying the former offices of state oil company PDVSA (the company's managers were sacked after twice trying to overthrow the democratically elected government), is an example not just to Latin America, but to the whole world that higher education is not just for the privileged.   

The UBV's whole ethos is radically different to the country's private universities.  "We wanted to revise the social relevance of degrees and offer new programmes, programmes that were innovative and adapted to the country," according to Maria Ejilda Castellano, rector of the UBV, speaking in 2004.  "We wanted to change the nature of technical education: to make it less fragmented, to involve the student in practice from the beginning, and to involve the student in projects from the start, rather than to fill a student with years of reading before they got a chance to actually do something, which was the model until then." These are ideas that universities here could do well with adopting. 

Breaking away from the traditional system of creating "depoliticised professionals", courses at the UBV stress social responsibility. Some 77% of the students are from poor backgrounds, and so the students are provided with food, healthcare and transport - and of course, there are no fees

As for Venezuelan students themselves, after several attempts to organise on a national level, the Frente Francisco Miranda (FFM) was formed in 2003, which has since become the largest youth-based organisation in the country.  Although not strictly speaking a student organisation, many of its members are indeed students, and its mission is for the most an educational one - it plays an important role in Misión Ribas, the government's programme for adults who have dropped out of high school, and Misión Sucre, which aims to get people from poor backgrounds into university. 

Ronny Pante is the general coordinator of the Movimiento Estudiantil Integracionista (Integration Students Movement), an official student organization at the "Simon Rodriguez" National Experimental University (UNESR) in the capital of the southern State of Bolivar. For two years, from 2004-2005, he was the organisational and ideological education officer of the Frente Francisco Miranda in Bolivar, and for a year now he has been the general coordinator of the Office of Education Programmes (Misiones) in Ciudad Bolivar.

Ronny will be in Britain from October 22^nd until November 5^th. We already have a very tight schedule, but if you want to organise a meeting in your university, please contact us as soon as possible (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

See video greetings from Ronny to British students (in Spanish)