Venezuelan Government Begins Distribution of 350,000 Laptop Computers to School Children

[Peace Patriot]

Venezuelan Government Begins Distribution of 350,000 Laptop Computers to School Children

By JUAN REARDON – VENEZUELANALYSIS.COM

Mérida, November 17th 2010 (Venezuelanalysis.com) – The Venezuelan government this week distributed the first of an additional 350,000 portable laptop computers to be provided to public elementary school children by the end of the year.

In the Caracas neighborhood of El Paraíso on Tuesday, Minister of Education Jennifer Gil, presided over the ceremony in which 109 Canaima computers were handed to first and second grade students at Mario Briceño Iragorry Elementary.

“The Canaima Plan is a milestone and a technological innovation. It allows us to keep deepening our integral and massive education system that does not involve just students, but the entire family environment, parents, representatives and teachers,” stated Gil at the event.

According to Gil, the Venezuelan government has invested BsF 700 million (US$163 million) this year in the acquisition from Portugal of the kid-friendly Canaima laptop computers, 228,000 of which have already been distributed this year. The goal for 2010 is to distribute a total of 525,000 Canaima computers.

During his weekly televised address to the nation on Sunday, President Hugo Chávez announced that all public schoolchildren are to be secured a portable computer, school uniforms, and books.

In reference to an educational program available on the laptops that portrays Venezuela’s liberation hero Simón Bolivar, Chávez said that, “it is much better watch these historical and cultural programs than the narco-soap operas filled with anti-values and the destruction of society.”

“Only in socialism is it possible to make real the rights of children, the rights of the people, to an improved quality of education and standard of living,” affirmed Gil.

The Canaima Program began in mid-2009 as part of an oil trading agreement between Venezuela and Portugal. The laptop computers run on the open source operating system Linux, and the educational programs and software included in them is designed by Venezuelan engineers at the Ministry of Education and the National Center for Information Technology (CNTI).

While in Portugal last month, Chávez announced the purchase of an additional 1.5 million Canaima computers as well as plans to install a Canaima production plant in Venezuela.

http://venezuelanalysis.com/news/5792
(my emphasis)

--------------------

According to RWers here and in the corpo-fascist press, Venezuela's economy is HORRIBLE...but WHO is cutting thousands of teacher's jobs, cutting core educational programs, charging fee after fee after fee in public schools, dismantling teachers' pensions, forcing teachers' to buy their own books and supplies, shutting down libraries and other atrocities, in an assault on education such as we have never seen, amidst bankster bailouts, and enrichment of the super-rich, and unprecedented Pentagon war profiteering?

Venezuela? Nope, they're creating a robust educational system for all! They''re even providing free university education. They are also providing health care for all. They have cut poverty in half and extreme poverty by more than 70%. They have wiped out illiteracy and vastly improved public participation. Their leftist government has its priorities straight. Whatever problems they have, they are SOLVING them and HELPING their people, by using the country's resources the right way--education, health care, bootstrapping the poor majority.

Our corpo-fascist government--whether run by Dems or Pukes--does NOT have its priorities straight. The Pukes massively steal our wealth. The Dems don't even object. They just try to keep a lid on things with minor adjustments--a bit of unemployment benefits here, insurance-run health care there--and they don't seem to care if they win or lose on these minor points, because the Pukes--amazingly, in our "Alice in Wonderland"-Diebold/ES&S manipulated country--are coming back into power, to rape us again.

They haven't stolen enough from our education system and other public services. They haven't seen enough obscene tuition increases at our so-called public universities. They haven't seen enough profit from illness and death. They haven't seen enough looting by the rich, bailouts for the rich, tax breaks for the rich and deregulation of the rich and powerful. They aren't finished with war, torture, soldier suicides, packed prisons, depravity, oppression. Our corpo-fascist rulers WANT MORE! And they've had it with the little tweaks and handslaps the Blue Dog Democrats have given them. By God, they want our blood!

It's damn sad to see this happening--more than sad, it's tragic. Something that is sad is merely pathetic. But something that is tragic is much worse because it is PREVENTABLE. That is the proper use of the word "tragic." A "tragic hero" brings his ruin down upon himself. That's why this is so awful. Our own people have let Diebold/ES&S happen--the takeover of our vote counting system by one, private, far-rightwing-connected corporation, using 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code. Our own people were asleep at the wheel as our public airwaves were taken over by fascist propagandists. Our own people have not been able to overcome the intense propaganda, demoralization and disempowerment that they have been subjected to--a hard task, I admit, but a requirement of being worthy to be called citizens of a democracy. And the Venezuelans HAVE! How? Well, it's not that complicated. They have TRANSPARENT vote counting.

While Venezuela advances--with its own problems, to be sure, but generally headed in the right direction--and most of South America advances with it, for Venezuela has been very influential there, as to social justice, real democracy and Latin American and multilateral cooperation--we languish, in the grip of monstrous forces--transglobal corporations and war profiteers--over whom we have no control. Latin America is going forward. We are going backward. They are achieving a "New Deal" for themselves. We are seeing the one we had dismantled. We are seeing our will as a people ignored and defied. We are seeing our once great, progressive democracy destroyed before our very eyes.

Is this tragedy still reversible? In my opinion, yes! And we must start with the privatized, non-transparent voting machines. Return vote counting to the PUBLIC VENUE. That is the first and essential step back to democracy--and it's still very doable.

With just this one successful movement--the restoration of TRANSPARENT vote counting across the land--we will begin to see change. We will have our leaders falling all over themselves to restore our public school system. We will see decent--not perfect, but decent--taxation and regulation. We will see the end of a foreign policy based on our humongously expensive war machine. We will see the end of all this "austerity" crapola--as if there were no money, ha, ha, ha--and the signs of new and general prosperity, based on our common values of creativity, a living wage, an educated populace, equal opportunity, EVERYONE bearing their fair share of our social responsibilities and a true marketplace, truly regulated to favor true competition, with many small businesses and NO monopolies and NO multinationals.

Well, I'm getting ahead of myself. Transparent vote counting will head us in the right direction. We will--with a lot of effort--be ABLE TO elect DECENT leaders. Further reform will follow.

You won't hear about programs like this--a computer for every child in Venezuela--from our corpo-fascist press. That's the problem. We are deliberately being deprived of the idea that such things CAN be done--by our own socially responsible, communal effort. So I'm posting this to remind us all of what CAN be done--of, by and for the people.

[Judi Lynn]

1. You're right. Even though our corporate media DID carry the story of Peruvian kids

getting laptops, we can ALL bet we will NEVER hear one peep about this huge outlay which will provide 350,000 laptops to kids who would never otherwise ever get one.

Interesting how selective our media became, finally. Nothing in it to resemble a service to the people.

You may remember corporate media shut down their foreign news bureaus during Reagan's time, brought them all home. It seemed crazy at the time, but now it seems to fit the pattern of bringing ALL the corporate media information together to be tightly screened, organized and published under very tight controls.

Thanks for this very cool news. Those laptops are going to make a helluva difference in the lives of those kids.

Rec.

[social_critic]

2. Need to do something about crime in the barrios

I'm not sure it's a sensible idea to give away computers when they can't keep crime under control. What do you think is going to happen to a child carrying a laptop in El Paraiso?

[Peace Patriot]

3. Yeah, why bother to educate the poor at all? Why should the hard-working rich pay for

public schools? Why should oil profits be wasted on these lazy, good-for-nothing criminals, whom God has seen fit, in His infinite wisdom, to consign to a life of squalor? Why not give the money to people who know what to do with it--the rich, who create housekeeping jobs and gardening jobs for the few worthy poor? Computers--bah! Given 'em prison cells instead, and fascist prison guards to beat subservience into these low-lifes!

Charles Dickens created many characters to describe Reagan-Bushism, though he couldn't know that that is what it would be called a hundred years hence. The best of them was probably Scrooge. When making money gets such a grip on your mind that you can see nothing else, your soul shrivels down to a tiny, shrunken, mean, hard little pea, isolated from all the life around you, and you become the bitterest of bitter people, the most lonely, isolated, miserable creature on earth, and you start spouting views just like this: "It ain't sensible to give poor kids computers. They are fated to live amongst criminals and gangs, in filth and want. That is the way things are. It is a waste of good money. And, um, Hugo is a terrorist-loving, crime-loving, incompetent dictator!"

:sarcasm:

:rofl:

---------------------------------

Tell me this, social_critic: How many violins, trumpets, French horns and other musical instruments that the Chavez government has GIVEN, free of charge, to tens of thousands of poor kids in Venezuela's barrios, along with a FREE classical music education--a program that has been touted by European and other music critics as "the rebirth of classical music"--how many of these instruments, which the children take home, every night, to practice at home, walking these expensive instruments through their barrios, have been stolen?

I don't know the answer to this. Could be none. Could be ten or a hundred or more. Given the community organization and social control in barrios, it wouldn't surprise me if the answer was none, but I don't know. But let's estimate high, for the sake of argument. Say ten in a hundred free classical musical instruments given to poor children are stolen. Is that a good reason NOT to give out the musical instruments to children HUNGRY for the beauty and the order and the mathematical perfection and sheer joy of classical music, and who prosper and grow large-souled in the discipline, cooperation and friendship of orchestral playing? These children have rocked the European and U.S. classical music establishments with their passionate, vibrant, amazing style. What began as a private vision of the transformative power of classical music for the poorest of street urchins, has grown, with generous Chavez government funding, into a national movement and a worldwide movement. The Chavez government just built them a brand new theater in Caracas. Child and community classical music orchestras have sprung up all over Venezuela--hundreds of them. The children's experience of the collective power of an orchestra to transform themselves and others has committed them to classical music for life. Thousands of poor children's lives have been transformed.

Would you deprive them of their beloved musical instruments because they might be stolen? I'll give you some credit. I'll guess that you wouldn't deprive them. Scrooge would. Reaganites, Bushites and Milton Friedmanites would. They would use that excuse, or any excuse, to reverse all benefits to the poor to further pad the pockets of the rich and the super-rich. But I'll guess that you wouldn't. I'll guess that all you wanted to do was make a sniping comment about Chavez, to reduce or eliminate any credit he might be given, and leftist government might be given, for this fine and forward-looking use of the oil money: to give computers to all schoolchildren.

But here is where you come off as a Reaganite, Bushite, Milton Friedmanite and Scrooge. You blame Chavez for not solving every problem in Venezuela. You want people to think "street crime" when they think of Chavez. But you refuse to acknowledge the truly amazing things that the Chavez government has accomplished, against great odds, that are equally important in evaluating Chavez as a leader and in evaluating the Bolivarian revolution, which is made up of many people. So it pisses you off if anybody highlights a Chavez accomplishment. You snipe at it. You tear it down. You are not only personally blind, you want others to be blind. You may be personally generous; you may actually think that government giving musical instruments and computers to poor kids is a great idea. But you will NEVER give Chavez, his government and the Bolivarians ANY credit for doing so. And that makes you a rightwing propagandist--a blind servant of the Scrooges of this world.

[Mika]

4. Yer always cuttin' libruls slack.

Take Obama fer instance. Like Chavez, he hasn't fixed everything either. Typical libruls.

:sarcasm:

---

Viva Cuba! Viva Venezuela! Viva Bolivia! Viva Bolivarianism!

[social_critic]

5. There you go again

The point isn't whether to educate the poor or not. The question is whether it's practical to hand out laptop computers to children who live in crime ridden neighborhoods, and to spend money this way when teacher pay is lousy, schools are poorly maintained, and there's no quality school breakfast and lunch program to make sure those computer toting youngsters got the mental capacity to use the darned computers. It's priorities, dude, priorities. And they don't seem to be in the right order.

[Judi Lynn]

6. Desperately uninformed. So sad. Creating and staffing neighborhood kitchens

in the poverty stricken areas was one of the FIRST things done. You're unaware of the government's "missions" which have altered life for poor people vastly, years ago.

Just one instant grab from a search produces useful material:

A Vision of Food Sovereignty for Venezuela

~snip~
Communities Feeding Themselves

The efforts to bolster domestic food production in Venezuela are being met with efforts to increase the ability of communities to feed themselves. There are over 6000 casas de alimentación, or feeding houses, around the country -- similar to US soup kitchens, but with a much broader mission. Casas provide nutritious food to those who need it most (pregnant women, children, the elderly, etc.), but are also meant to serve as hubs of community gathering and organizing. These programs are primarily based out of people's homes, and many were started by volunteers, purely to meet needs of their communities. They are now run through a remarkable grassroots/government partnership: the government provides food and kitchen equipment, and members of the community prepare the food and keep the sites running.

As the program has become established, those who run the casas now receive stipends, increasing community self-sufficiency. A woman who runs a feeding program directly out of her living room in the El Valle neighborhood of Caracas is clear about her priorities: "This is my job, but I don't do it for the money. This is my contribution to the process ." Additionally, the government promotes Venezuelan agriculture in the food that it provides to the casas, with the goal of eventually supplying 100% Venezuelan-grown food.

Along with providing for those most in need, there is an emphasis on universal access to affordable high-quality food. In 2002, the government started Mercal , a national network of subsidized food markets. The markets were created after a group opposing the government attempted to bring the national economy to a standstill by halting oil production and shutting down major industries. Major food distributors withheld food supplies and corporate-run supermarkets closed. This drove home the implications of Venezuela importing over 70% of its food, primarily from large corporations.

More:
http://www.whyhunger.org/news-and-alerts/47-why-speaks/550-a-vision-of-food-sovereignty-for-venezuela.html

~~~~~

~snip~
Across Venezuela, it's hard to miss the new investment in public education. Schools are being upgraded in urban and rural areas and are required to offer free breakfasts and lunches, arts, music and after-school activities. Unlike the U.S., these are well-funded mandates. Illiteracy has been virtually wiped out, according to UNESCO, thanks to adult education that has penetrated the poorest neighborhoods.

In poor communities, federally-subsidized stores called "mercals" sell food at half the market price. In the capital of Caracas, thousands of government-funded soup kitchens offer free lunches every weekday to the indigent; our delegation was headquartered in a church that served 150 free lunches per day. Across the country, new housing is being built to replace shantytown "ranchos" that so many Venezuelans live in.

More:
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0706-32.htm

Too busy to do the work for you which is your responsibility. I'm involved in dinner prep here in my own home right now.

God knows there is more than enough material which has been posted right here at D U years and years ago on the subject. You could find it right here without leaving your chair.

[social_critic]

8. Neighborhood kichens

Crime in Venezuela is real. It's pervasive, and anybody who says they expect children to walk around carrying lap top computers without endangering themselves is unaware of reality. In the barrios, it's dangerous for a youngster to wear nice shoes, never mind a laptop.

The neighborhood kitchens aren't a replacement for a school cafeteria. Anybody who understands how to get a poor child educated knows very well the meals have to be provided in school, so they can get up early, get fed properly, study, eat lunch. And if there's money left over, you can keep them around to do some sports and help them do their homework to keep them out of trouble. This is the way it's done when there's money to pay for the food and programs. And it's a much better way to spend money than to buy the darned computers, which are going to get stolen and may get the child killed in the process.

A much better option is to put large computers inside a room in the school with very good bars on the window, and a steel door. And people will have to get paid to keep watch at night, because the barrio gangsters would probably use sledge hammers to cut through the walls to get to the computers. This is the way it's in real life. Learn about it.

[Judi Lynn]

10. Your attempt to mislead is clear. No one said a word about a replacement for school food.

Not even close. As I said, I maintain, it's your responsibility to learn the FACTS.

Poverty Reduction in Venezuela
A Reality-Based View

By Mark Weisbrot

~snip~
Access to education has also been greatly expanded. This is especially true at the level of higher education: from the 1999-2000 school year to 2006-2007, enrollment increased by 86 percent; estimates for the 2007-2008 school year put the increase at 138 percent from the 1999-2000 base. For secondary education, the increase from the 1999-2000 school year to 2006-2007 is 54 percent. For basic education (grades 1 through 9) the increase over this period was 10 percent; but this was already at a 91 percent gross enrollment level in 1999-2000.

Some 3.9 million school children – about half of the population between three and seventeen years of age – now receive lunches in school.

In addition, more than 15,000 government (Mercal) food stores distribute basic food items at discounts from 27 to 39 percent; and there are some 894,300 people served by soup kitchens. Some of the impact of the discounted food from the Mercal stores – but not the soup kitchens or school lunches -- should show up in Venezuela’s cash-income based poverty rate through lower prices, although it is difficult to say exactly how much.

It is therefore clear that the sharp reduction in poverty in Venezuela, as measured by the official poverty rate, captures only a part of the improvement in living standards for the poor.

http://www.drclas.harvard.edu/revista/articles/view/1100

~~~~~
Venezuela’s revolution achieves social gains
by: W. T. Whitney Jr.
March 12 2010

~snip~
Food supplementation is one success story. Eleven years ago, 252,000 children received school meals. Now, over four million receive two meals a day in schools. A million people eat at special locations set aside for meals. Another is literacy, with the rate rising from 86 percent in 2001 to 96 percent presently.

More:
http://www.peoplesworld.org/venezuela-s-revolution-achieves-social-gains/

~~~~~
The Venezuelan Effort to Build a New Food and Agriculture System
Christina Schiavoni and William Camacaro

Christina and William interviewed by Against the Grain

~snip~
Two additional initiatives to improve food security and nutrition are a national school meals program and a law guaranteeing nutritious meals for workers.29 The School Feeding Program provides universal free breakfast, lunch, and snacks to more than four million children. The Law for Workers’ Nutrition, passed in 2004, requires workplaces of twenty or more people to provide workers with either a hot meal on-site or swipe cards with “nutrition points” that are redeemable at restaurants and food stores. Venezuela’s wide range of feeding programs, combined with other forms of social support, have enabled the country to meet the first Millennium Development Goal of halving hunger and poverty ahead of the 2015 target and have also cut malnutrition-related deaths in half from 1998 to 2006.30

More:
http://www.monthlyreview.org/090824shiavoni-camacaro.php

ETC.

[Peace Patriot]

7. Give them the instruments and they will play Beethoven like it was meant to be played!

And if some mean little bugger steals their violin, give them another one! And then give the little bugger one, too!

That's the philosophy of the Bolivarian Children's Orchestra, and of the Chavez government, and that's as it should be. It is an investment of faith in the human spirit.

Your stance is ridiculous. And it's useless to cite for you the vast resources, support and advocacy that the Chavez government has committed to education--to teachers salaries and pensions, to school construction and renovation, to computers, books, school uniforms, lunch programs, baseball playing fields and equipment, adult literacy and adult education, college and university education--and reading in general, with the publication of millions of books. It is their biggest commitment. It is their watchword. Education, education, education!

I won't cite the UN reports and the Latin American regional reports and the Millennium Project reports and all the reports on vast improvements in literacy, education and the reduction of poverty, because you just don't seem to care about facts. But I would like to ask you some questions:

Would refuse to give a child shoes because they might get stolen? Would you refuse a bum a dollar because he might spend it on drink? What is this SUPPOSITION of yours that things will go wrong, rather than right, or that, if things go wrong, then the giving was wrong?

Of course nobody wants the child to whom you give shoes, or a violin, or a computer, to be living in a poor or crime-ridden neighborhood! But what if it's not possible right now to change those conditions? You wait to clothe him, feed him, educate him, until you can...move his family? Build housing projects? Get his mother or father a job, so THEY can, some day, move their family? You wait til you have the project together to tear the bad neighborhood down...THEN you'd give him a computer? You want government to do EVERYTHING? Ha! Or, say you see a really down and out guy--thin, dirty, decrepit, and he asks you for a dollar? Do you wait until he enters a rehab program--assuming that that's what he needs? Do you follow him around so he doesn't spend it on booze? Do you invite him home and give him a meal and a bed? Not every problem can be solved all at once. So you do NOTHING?

And I'd sure like to know how you would administer the computers for kids program. They only go to the "nice" neighborhoods?

You are dissing the Chavez government for doing a useful and necessary thing--giving ALL kids access to and experience on computers--because they aren't DOING EVERYTHING. They haven't torn down that barrio and forced everybody in that community to move somewhere else. They haven't given that family, and thousands of other families, a home mortgage loan yet, to move elsewhere. They don't have the houses up yet to move them to. They haven't yet put enough cops on the beat to guarantee that no robberies will occur. So they DON'T give children computers? They DON'T proceed with their educational goals, of which the computer distribution is just one? They just halt it all and say, 'No, you can just keep living in the Dark Ages cuz we don't like your 'hood!"

And I want to know: Would you refuse to give classical musical instruments to poor street urchins because they live on the street or in hovels?

And if your answer is yes, how do you account for the fabulous success of the Children's Classical Music Orchestra, where they did just that--gave expensive, precious instruments to street kids, for their personal use, at home and at school? Why can't you see the parallel? Was that money wasted? Were those instruments abused? Not at all. They were CHERISHED! As I said, I don't know if any were stolen, but SO WHAT? The success of the program went beyond anyone's wildest dreams, and, at its core, was the faith that poor children WANT to improve, to learn, to perform, to be useful and positive, even at very, very difficult tasks.

If this worked so well with musical instruments--as it clearly, unquestionably did--why wouldn't it work with computers? It is exactly the same principle. The child will NEVER play a classical musical instrument if he or she doesn't have an instrument to play. A child will NEVER bootstrap himself or herself into the modern technical world if he or she doesn't have a computer to practice on. It's that simple. And I'm sure depreciation--some losses to damage or theft--is factored in. With children, it always is.

Please at least answer my question about this analogy. What is the difference between providing free musical instruments in the children's orchestra program and providing free computers, in both cases to poor children including those living on the street or in hovels in unsafe neighborhoods?

[social_critic]

9. Give reality a break, dude

The children need books, blackboards, food, clean bathrooms, better teachers, discipline. They need to live in a place with clean water, and free of mosquitoes, where crime is kept under control, and their homes aren't in danger of collapsing down the hill when it rains, where the parents can buy the food with money they earn, and inflation doesn't rage at a world record pace. Real life is tough, and it seems so remote from those of you whose aquaintance with it is so theoretical. Your analogy doesn't work, because the computer has to come after the basics are there. And as long as crime is so high and their diet is poor, and the schools are in poor shape, this computer gimmick is just that, a gimmick.

[gdghirardi]

11. A visit to La Vega

I visited a school in the Barrio La Vega last year and I saw the computers in racks inside inside the classroom. I was told that the children use them in the classroom and were not taking them home.

[Judi Lynn]

12. It's wonderful seeing your illuminating comment. A little truth goes a long way.

Welcome to D.U., gdghirardi. :hi:

[naaman fletcher]

13. Yes it is

We have a lot of great members here who have actually been to Latin america

[social_critic]

14. Computers being sold on the street

Point made, then. Giving them portables to keep in the school is fairly wasteful. Also, there are reports now of computers being sold on the street - if they can be taken out, they are stolen and sold. Again, this is one of those things done by the government in a stupid fashion, wasting resources they don't have. Those of you who naively and romantically defend this type of spending just don't understand what it's like in the bulk of Venezuelan public schools - they are lousy, poorly maintained, education is low quality, and the least they worry about is having computers. You are so so out of touch with reality.

[roody]

15. Bienvenida.

[social_critic]

16. La Vega is a crime-ridden barrio, whose citizens live in fear

This is from El Pais, a Spanish newspaper:

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/portada/Caracas/guerra/nombre/elpepusoceps/20100418elpepspor_9/Tes

"Caracas vive una guerra en la cual todos pierden. Nadie gana. Nadie gana nada en una guerra que consume cada año miles de víctimas. Caracas vive una guerra que no tiene nombre. Se trata de una guerra silente que muchas veces no se puede ver porque el encierro, producto del temor, permite a sus habitantes quedarse ciegos de tanto mirar en la oscuridad."

Translation:

"Caracas is experiencing a war in which everyone loses. Nobody wins. Nobody wins anything in a war that consumed thousands of lives each year. Caracas is living through a war that has no name. It is a silent war that often can not be seen because its people are shuttered, as a result of fear, and blind from staring into the darkness. "