New law places priority on Venezuela's education

[IndianaGreen]

New law places priority on Venezuela's education

Friday 14 August 2009

Venezuela's National Assembly has passed a law that guarantees "quality education" for all and seeks to ensure that children grow up to become socially responsible citizens.

Rightwingers claim that the Organic Law on Education amounts to "socialist indoctrination" and, as MPs began approving the legislation article by article last night, demonstrations both for and against the reform kicked off in central Caracas.

Education Minister Hector Navarro accused conservatives and the corporate media of orchestrating "a smear campaign" to deceive Venezuelans and destabilise the government.

"It was said that families would be left without the patria potestas of their children and that the state, or the so-called regime, was going to concentrate about 10 million kids in children's centres to indoctrinate them until they were 20 years old," Mr Navarro reported.

He said that "this invention was created by an announcer who worked at the state-run Radio Nacional de Venezuela - he is working now at a radio station in Miami."

Article 3 of the law reads that "the state will guarantee the infrastructure, equipment, investments, programmes and human resources and services to assure that everyone has equality of conditions and opportunity and democratic, continuous, integral, intercultural, quality education."

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/world/new_law_places_priority_on_venezuela_s_education

[billyoc]

1. I love people who teach their children to worship money, yet talk about "indoctrination".

[Igel]

2. It's a bit schizophrenic.

I expected as much. It has to say all the right things for various groups.

So parents have freedom of religion, but must to teach certain things (and not others), because the state and community groups are "corresponsible" in playing a "liberating role" to ensure a "new citizenry", good "republicanas y republicanos" (I dread trying to translate that cleanly and simply). The media have to cede a role because they're bound by the ley organica, and can't publish/print/promulgate anything contrary to the principles ensconced in the education law--whatever they are, they're supreme. They must teach inclusion even while having the right kind of Bolivarian framework (one which, of course, is not wholly inclusive).

I've read things like it before. The parts that get enforced are those necessary to realize a governmental objective; the parts that don't serve government objectives need a strong, independent court to enforce (and even then don't always get enforced). It's a legal buffet.

I usually stop reading when I get to how important it is that language X be kept pure. Mostly it's a bit of chauvinism, which always amuses me in a "progressive" document. I'm a linguist; there's hardly a "pure" language on earth (I make allowance for the possibility that some truly isolated linguistic isolates may have no reconstructable proto-language shared with another language, and have no borrowings; I doubt this, but it's possible).