Grupo La Colina

Hugo Chávez seeks to catch them young ("Chávez busca atraparlos jóvenes")

Aug 20th 2009 | CARACAS
From The Economist print edition

THE first time Hugo Chávez made a serious attempt to reshape the Venezuelan education system, the resulting political battle contributed to the coup that in 2002 briefly ousted him from the presidency. A new education law, shoved through parliament on the night of August 13th after minimal debate, already has the opposition talking of civil disobedience.

The government claims that the law will overcome centuries of exclusion, at last giving the children of the poor equal access to education. But its critics argue that it fails to deal with the key causes of inequality—low-quality teaching, crumbling buildings and widespread truancy in state schools. Whereas Mr Chávez’s Ecuadorean ally, Rafael Correa, seems sincere in his drive to raise educational standards (see next story), the focus of the Venezuelan leader’s reforms is on ensuring the intrusion of politics at every level. Mariano Herrera, an educationalist, predicts that the result will be greater inequality, not less.

Teaching is to be rooted in “Bolivarian doctrine”, a reference to Mr Chávez’s ill-defined Bolivarian revolution—supposedly inspired by Simón Bolívar, a leader of Latin America’s 19th-century independence struggle. Schools will come under the supervision of “communal councils”, indistinguishable in most places from cells of the ruling socialist party. Central government will run almost everything else, including university entrance and membership of the teaching profession.

Couched in vague terms, the law acquires coherence when seen against the president’s professed intention to establish revolutionary hegemony over Venezuelan society. In a 2007 campaign on a referendum on constitutional change, Mr Chávez lectured a bemused public on the writings of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian communist who died in 1937. In essence, Gramsci said that to eliminate the bourgeois state one must seize the institutions that reproduce the dominant class’s thought-patterns.

The three most important of these institutions, the president noted, were the church, the education system and the mass media. Among the iniquitous doctrines with which they poisoned the minds of the masses, he argued, were representative democracy, the division of state powers and alternating government.

The new education law also lets the government suspend media outlets that affect the public’s “mental health” or cause “terror” among children. It threatens to end subsidies for church-run schools that educate the poor. And it seeks to weaken or abolish students’ and teachers’ unions and to “democratise” university authorities.

How much of Gramsci the president has actually read is unclear. What is apparent is that the law was not framed in parliament but by a team of ideologues in the presidential palace. Legislators suspect Cuban specialists had a hand in it, along with radicals from the Spanish left in Mr Chávez’s close circle.

Whether or not it can be implemented as intended will become clear as schools and universities reopen in September. Some opposition politicians and educationalists want to gather signatures for a referendum to repeal the law, as is allowed under the constitution. Student groups, the church, the media, parents and teachers could together form a powerful coalition.

University rectors say the hasty way the law was passed violated both parliamentary norms and the constitution. They were tear-gassed when they approached parliament as it was being debated, to try to deliver a document criticising its content. But a campaign of peaceful resistance is gathering strength.

Since winning a referendum in February abolishing term limits (thus allowing him to seek re-election again in 2012), Mr Chávez has stepped up the pace of his revolution. He has taken powers and funds from mayors and governors, clamped down on independent trade unions and broadcasters, and passed a law which will allow the government-controlled electoral authority to gerrymander constituency boundaries. A wilting economy and a lack of money to spend on his ambitious welfare programmes have begun to sap Mr Chávez’s popularity, forcing him to keep casting around for fresh scapegoats.

In his weekly broadcast on August 16th he promised a stimulus package but gave no indication of how he would pay for it. With public dissent growing, his response has been to stifle sources of independent thinking, be they private television channels, trade unions, the church or the schools and universities. However, once he has achieved complete dominance over them all, there will be no one left to blame for the country’s ills but himself.