The counterrevolution in Nicaraguan education

For over a decade, education was a top priority for the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The UNESCO-recognized Literacy Crusade of 1980, which reduced the illiteracy rate from 53 percent to 12 percent, was followed by a proliferation of adult education programs and the extension of educational opportunities through the university level to the rural and urban poor. However, by the latter part of the revolutionary period war, economic blockade and errors took their toll, as illiteracy once again climbed, education programs were cut, facilities deteriorated, and teachers left the system.

On February 25, 1990, the Sandinista government was defeated at the polls by a U.S.-backed coalition of parties with a neoliberal economic program. At the head of the Education Ministry (MED) were placed, successively, Sofonias Cisneros and Humberto Belli, both conservative Catholics. In the two years since the elections, what changes have occurred in the education system, and how are teachers and students responding to these changes?

A central aspect of the new education program, according to Katherine Grigsby, former Vice Education Minister, and Darwin Juarez, former National Education Council member, is the "Catholicization" of education. The Chamorro government's first education minister, Sofonias Cisneros, a civil engineer, was the president of the Catholic Theresian School's Parents Association, and very close to Nicaraguan Cardinal Obando y Bravo, who apparently recommended him for the job. Cisnero's vice-minister, Humberto Belli, the current Education Minister, belongs to a charismatic Catholic sect, the City of God. In declarations made early in his tenure, Belli defined the MED's new education policy as "a Christian policy, dialectical in life, so the student can develop his critical consciousness."(1)

What this means may be seen in the introduction of classes in "Morality and Civics" in the elementary schools. The textbooks for these classes, "Let's Learn to Get Along," written by the authorities of the Theresian school, quote extensively from the Bible and inculcate the conservative Christian agenda regarding sexuality, abortion, sex roles, marriage, and respect for the figure of a punitive God.(*) Mario Quintana, Secretary General of the National Teachers Union (ANDEN), pointed out that the Ministry of Education "withdrew a large number of books donated by Norway, simply because the natural science texts discuss the origin of humans." Darwin Juarez argued that, "By incorporating the Catholic Church's values in the education system, the MED violates the secular character of education, guaranteed by the Constitution, as well as the religious freedom of other social sectors."

The Education Ministry has also raised banners against politics and ideology in the schools. Educators such as Doreyda Obando, a sixth grade teacher at the Sierra Maestra School, view this with skepticism: "They can't say that now education is not politicized, because clearly every education system responds to the interests of the government in power, so I think they should [distinguish between] |the politics of the previous government and the politics of the new government.'"

"Since we were living in a revolutionary process," Doreyda Obando added, "the revolution was reality, and what we taught the children was based on reality." Thus, behind the claim that the authorities want to "depoliticize" education, said Mario Quintana, "they want to eliminate the revolutionary thought developed during ten years in order to impose their own type of thinking." Deputy Education Minister Humberto Belli confirmed his words: "Your highest purpose," he said to teachers, "is to exorcise from the books, classrooms, and schools all the evil taught during ten years of evolution."(2)

The methods education officials have employed to |exorcise' the education system include burning books from schools and public libraries and firing and harassing Sandinista teachers. According to Mari Quintana, the new education authorities have fired over 1,000 teachers and transferred many others to distant regions because of their Sandinista or trade union affiliation. Student leaders and those involve in protests have also been expelled or suspended by their schools.

The MED has also begun to change the curriculum, methods, and textbooks in accordance with their overall political conception. For example, Katherine Grigsby explained that the MED had abolished the "Science and Production" programs, "which sought to link intellectual and manual work via a liberatory pedagogy," and have added programs such as "Morality and Civics," Philosophy (written by authorities of the National Theological Seminary), and Computation, "You're talking about computation for an elite, for those who have access and economic possibilities to have computers," said Grigsby. "This is a type of demagogic manipulation that doesn't fit the reality of a country as underdeveloped, in an economic crisis as profound, as Nicaragua."

Pedagogical methods such as that of Paulo Freire used in the Literacy Crusade, adult education, and some rural education programs during the Sandinista administration, have also given way to methods more in line with the new government's educational goals. "While the new government recognizes the need to promote critical and investigative thinking," observed Katherine Grigsby, "we doubt very much that they would favor a method like Freire's, which leads to the development of a critical consciousness, a class position, organization, mobilization, and the transformation of reality. They've categorized the concept and methodology of our adult education and literacy programs as practically subversive, too saturated with a popular political option. Those elements are not present in their educational program. What is present is the instrumental expression of our Popular Education Methodology, but not political concept contained in Freire's philosophy. So it's superficial, an education that reproduces knowledge, but not a creative, transforming, liberating education."

The new education authorities have also changed curricular methods of teaching elementary school reading and writing from the "phonetic, analytical, synthetic method," which had been used for eight years, to a syllabic method, used in the United States and other countries. Unlike the syllabic method, which is based on memorization of written syllables, the phonetic method enabled the students to learn the written word through phonemes, analyze the word, and learn about other subjects. Such changes in methodology may have created learning problems for children. Parents and educators have noted arrested development in reading and writing, for example.

The contents of course such as history, Spanish, and even math have been revised. According to Doreyda Obando, the history curriculum she is now expected to teach, "is a far away history, of Europe, Christopher Columbus, not the history of the exploitation we suffered when they came over here." Mario Quintana argued that "the new history texts try to insulate the students from the history of our country. I think this in attempt to separate the student from this country's reality, make the child study numbers and letters, but not make a connection with this country's problems."

Katherine Grisby identified the substitution of textbooks as one of the centerpieces of the Chamorro governments' educational transformation. Once the new administration took office, "they rapidly substituted textbooks, with the help of AID, adapting texts from Colombia, mainly, and some books from Honduras. The books from Colombia were even obsolete, they stopped using them in the 70s."

"Why didn't the Ministry of Education ask national authors to write the schoolbooks and national publishers to produce them?" asked Darwin Juarez. "Because," he answered, "they had an agreement with AID" that stipulated the rapid replacement of Sandinista textbooks with acceptable textbooks published in other Latin American countries. U.S. AID supplied the Education Ministry with $12 million to replace schoolbooks. AID officials also directly supervised the writing of new schoolbooks.

Besides changes in what is being taught and how it is being taught, Nicaraguan educators are concerned about who is being taught, about the tendency to return to a past when the rural and urban poor couldn't afford any education for their children.

Darwin Juarez cited several factors leading to this conclusion. Services and resources such as textbooks, which were previously free, are now paid for while others such as a milk program for elementary students have been eliminated. The government's economic program has led to massive cutbacks in education and other services, falling real wages, and an unemployment rate of 50 percent. As a result, parents have been forced to take more than 200,000 elementary and high school students out of school.

Furthermore, the MED has implemented policies favoring privatization of public schools and universities. According to Juarez, this as become a general tendency throughout Latin America, based on President Ronald Reagan's "Santa Fe II, A Strategy for Latin America." In one recent instance last May, the MED announced its intention to privatize a public high school, the Mexico Experimental Institute (in part to try to break a teachers strike). "The mobilization of the education community - teachers, students, and parents - prevented this from happening, and the MED had to renounce its plan to privatize this school, which became a symbol of the official intention to privatize many schools and the resistance to this policy by the educational community."

But according to Juarez, the MED is also taking indirect measures to promote privatization. "One method the use," he explained, "is not hiring enough high school teachers, so there are 80 to 100 students in a classroom. Why? So teachers resign, so students become disillusioned and drop out. Or there is inadequate maintenance of installations or laboratories. The result is that private schools then appear to be the better choice for education because they have enough teachers, adequate physical installations, and equipment."

Another policy favoring privatization has been the government's budget cuts in higher education. This has left 15,000 high school students without access to college this year and perhaps 25,000 next year. The High Council of Private Enterprise (COSEP) has pointed to those students as a reason for establishing a private university. That in itself wouldn't be a problem, said Juarez. "What is a problem are the cuts in spending on public universities, and COSEP's professed intention of returning to the days of the elite university: you go to college if you can pay for it."

Government policy has worsened working conditions for the country's approximately 28,000 teachers. According to Mario Quintana, "teachers' salaries don't even cover the minimum basic necessities. There are teachers who have to work double or even triple time, or take other jobs to make ends meet. Over 80 percent of the teachers are women, many single mothers, and from this point of view wages are a first-order problem." Teachers earn about 275 cordobas ($55) a month, while prices are comparable to those in the United States. A working-class household of seven spends about 200 cordobas a week on basic necessities.

Government economic and education policies have thrust the teachers union ANDEN into the forefront of the struggle to protect wages and working conditions and improve education. Besides struggling to improve wages, ANDEN has sought to improve job security for teachers by sponsoring a law to institutionalize the teaching profession, which was discussed and approved in the National Assembly. ANDEN is also demanding participation in the formulation of educational policy. According to Mario Quintana, although ANDEN wasn't satisfied with its level of participation during the Sandinista administration, "the difference is that today the MED prevents our participation. What we want," he explained, "is not participation at the top, but a national consultation of teachers, as was done previously in order to define the Sandinista government's education program." Other demands ANDEN has put forward include professional training, provision of basic foods, better pay for retirees, health care, improvements in deteriorating school facilities, and availability of educational resources.

Last Spring, faced with government intransigence, delays in Easter vacation paychecks, and demeaning salary adjustments, 18,000 teachers staged a fifty-day strike. The strike enjoyed the support of most parents and students, according to Quintana, including participation in demonstrations, meetings, and school occupations and economic and material support. In fact, students led by the Federation of Secondary Students took over the National Palace, "in support of the teachers, but also to press for resumption of classes." Quintana underlined the dilemma faced by parents and students, who supported the teachers while wanting to avoid loss of classes. "We discussed this continuously with them, and committed ourselves to replace the lost class time once the strike ended."

The strike settlement allowed for a 25 percent wage increase, which left most teachers dissatisfied. It also included the renegotiation of the contract and the issuance of the Teaching Profession Law regulations, delayed by the MED and still a point of disagreement, since ANDEN considers some of the regulations "unconstitutional and against the spirit of the Teaching Profession Law." In addition, said Quintana, "our organization was greatly strengthened to face future battles that will undoubtedly occur. We also drew closer to parents, students and other unions."

The current priority is to strengthen the union. To accomplish this, Quintana stressed the need to forge an accountable leadership through elections at every level. Educated, capable trade unionists are also essential, and the union is holding workshops for national and territorial leaders and the rank and file. Union leaders are also meeting with parents and students. In addition, ANDEN held a national assembly at the end of August to "evaluate the performance of the National Executive during its first year."

Perhaps key to ANDEN's future ability to grow and consolidate, encourage active participation among its members, and act belligerently their behalf, is its new autonomy from the Sandinista Front. During a decade of revolutionary government, most Sandinista unions became virtual appendages of the party. According to Quintana, "this led us to sacrifice the teachers' specific and immediate interests in order to uphold national interests, which were not always shared by all teachers. Today, we can say that the rank and file and the leadership - pushed by the rank and file - are addressing those specific teachers' demands in the first place, but also taking into account national interests." The ANDEN leader said that the recent FSLN congress ratified the position that the party "can't impose anything on the mass organizations that doesn't come from the rank and file of those organizations."

ANDEN is not the only organizations struggling to protect and extend the revolution's gains in the area of education. However, ANDEN's struggles "are much more oriented toward labor and social demands than to pedagogical and educational demands," said Katherine Grigsby, "although they've certainly criticized the new educational program." Grigsby argued for "greater organization in order to be able to contribute to an educational project more coherent with Nicaraguan reality."

Katherine Grigsby is now the Assistant Director of the Nicaraguan Institute for Popular Investigations and Education (INIEP). Hers is one of several organizations that, "rather than confronting governmental education policy, are working in two ways: to provide a distinct alternative to the government program for certain sectors of the population, and to offer a series of educational projects and actions to large numbers of people who no longer have access to the education system for economic reasons."

INIEP, the Nicaraguan Environmental Movement, the Center for Health Research and Education, the Community Movement, the Farmworkers Association, the Nicaraguan Women's Association, the Christian literacy organization ALFALIT, and the AIDS education group IMOWATZIN have formed a network. "We're implementing educational projects linked to integral community development. That is, not education for its own sake, but education for life, for survival. For example, our literacy project is linked to health and the environment: health because of the enormous increase in infant mortality, post-partum deaths, and malnutrition, and the environment because of the deterioration of the environment and because many people don't know how to make sustained use of the few natural resources they have access to.

"We're beginning to see education from another perspective, an education that not even we offered in the past. We think this is civil society's way of making its own important educational spaces."

NOTES

1. Darwin Juarez, "Reforma o Contrareforma Educativa" (28 July 1990;

unpublished address). 2. "The New Exorcist," Barricada International, 8 September 1990, p. 21.

(*) For example, the sixth grade Morality and Civics reader, referring to the Sixth and Ninth Commandments, warns children: "With these two Commandments, God teaches us that sexual relations outside marriage are illicit." Further explaining, it adds that, "Modesty and chastity are great qualities. The lack of modesty causes temptations, sin, and scandal. We should be respectable by being modest in the way we dress, avoiding clothes or poses that stimulates sexual desire in others."

"Marriage," continues the reader, "for its importance and dignity, is meant to be indissoluble. In religious matrimony, the couple declare themselves united "until death do us part."

The schoolbook also appeals to the Law of God to reject the right to abortion: "After looking at the theme of responsible paternity, we must speak about abortion, because there are people who do it to avoid having a child. Although those who promote abortions use many arguments, the truth is the Law of God prohibits taking the life of another human being: |Thou shalt not kill,' orders the Ten Commandments."

"It's a horrible crime to abort a child. Although human laws, in some countries permit it, the law of God will never permit it."

Michael Friedman worked in Nicaragua from 1982-1987, first as a writer and translator for the FSLN weekly Barricada International, then as a biologist and rural extensionist in the Aquaculture Program of the Nicaraguan Fisheries Institute (INPESCA). He is currently teaching high school in Manhattan, and he was in Nicaragua in July interviewing several people about Nicaragua's educational reform.

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