This document summarizes key aspects of the Cuban approach to education according to 5 criteria: 1) Education is a product of family, school, and society, not just schools. 2) Educational tasks are required from birth through cultural mediation and developing vivencia. 3) Adults and peers actively organize the social and cultural environment to enable learner participation. 4) Early education aims to create a positive emotional environment and facilitate independence through games, objects, drawing, and modeling. 5) Approaches for special needs build on these principles with additional support and compensation for deficits.

1. WHYISCUBAN
EDUCATION
THOUGHTAND
PRACTICERELEVANT
TOENGLISH
EDUCATION?
Mike Blamires.
OPEN SPACES February 05 2013

3. A CRITIQUE OF SUPERFICIAL MECHANICAL LEARNING:
Rote Learning has been emphasised where “like all other
systems of its age made more of the forms and symbols than
of the things symbolised.
To repeat the words correctly was everything : to understand
their meaning nothing thus the spirit was sacrificed to the
letter.
He stated that whilst rote learning was declining so was the
allied strategy of teaching by rules which consisted of giving
the pupil the rule first thus providing the pupil with the net
product of inquiry without the inquiry and producing an
appearance of understanding without the reality.
__________ saw this as a hugely inefficient pedagogy
because rules, ‘lying isolated in the mind and not joined to
other contents as out growths from them- are continually
forgotten. Instead he proposed that principles are derived from
repeated engagement with particular problems and’
familiarisation with the facts’ so that ‘a new case is solved as
readily as an old one’.

4. DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?

5. PRESSURES
 Spencer distinguishes between principles that are derived by the student
as a result of engaging with teacher set problems.
 He suggests that the interconnection of principles becomes a resource
for further enquiry and the organisation of knowledge rather than the
collection or disparate facts and rules that arise from rote teaching and
rules.

6. DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?

7. CESAR WITH HIS MUM

8. JOSE MARTI AND MARIA

9. Josie Marti: A false concept of public education
The schools here – with their beautiful books, their grand facilities,
their outward order, their pencils and slates, their grammars and
geography books – have become workshops for memorising
•where children languish year after year in sterile spelling lessons,
maps and calculations,
•where corporal punishment is authorised and practiced,
• where time is wasted copying words and listing mountains and
rivers;
•where the live elements of the world we inhabit or how the human
creature can improve himself and serve in the inevitable contact
with those elements, are never taught,
•where teacher and pupils do not share that warmth of affection
which enlarges to giant size the student’s desire and aptitude for
learning …. comforting and gladdening their paths in life’s
unavoidable spells of dejection.
Comments about The US
System in 1860s(?)

10. Josie Marti : Educational Principles
Lay Education
Science and Technical Education
until basic education becomes scientific – until a child is
taught to manage those elements of the earth which are to
nourish him when he is a man
Education for Life
To make the student fit for his or her historic moment and
circumstance
Education must have national content
The education of the sons of these smaller countries in
a country of an opposite character and superior wealth,
can bring the student into a fatal opposition to his
native country

11. NEO-LIBERALISM...
 ... has been characterised as the process of marketisation
rather than social investment (Giroux, 2008),
> decentralisation yet with increased surveillance and
control from the centre (Hill, 2009),
 precaretisation in terms of a reductions in working
conditions and job satisfaction (Negri, 2008)
 and the diminution in equality of access to experience and
outcome leading to marginalisation and, ultimately,
increasing differentials in income.

12. More than half of children under the age of 16 have their own
television sets at home. Young people in the UK spend more time
watching television than anywhere in Europe.
The licence children are given by their parents to get about
independently has been dramatically constrained, most
graphically illustrated in the proportion of 7 and 8 year-olds getting
to school by themselves, which had declined from 80%
to 9% (between 1971 and 1990).
A study of German and English schoolchildren’s travel patterns
found that nearly a third of English children in the survey
were collected from school by car – almost four times the
proportion of the same age group of German children. Three-
quarters of German children walked home on their
own after school, compared to only one third of the English
children. No particular place to go? [2003]
No Particular Place To Go:
Children, young people and public space (2003)
www.groundwork.org.uk

13. Translation: "The Bush Plan: It will
take away from you the morning kiss,
the hug at the end of the school day,
and your mischievous smile.
Thank Goodness, we live in Free
Cuba."

14.  “..collective mobilisation , religious and indigenous
tradition and a long experience with struggles for
liberation , tempered by a sense of tragedy and
failure, have allowed Latin America to follow a path
that differs from post Cold War messianic visions of
inevitable progress elsewhere. “ p3
 Guardiola _Rivera (2011)

15. 5 CRITERIA FOR A CULTURAL HISTORICAL
APPROACH
 Education is a product of the family, school and society, not solely of the school.
It is a complex product of social relationships and cultural interchange.
 Many educational tasks are required straight from the moment of birth of the
human being.
 The correct social inter-relationships and collaboration, the emotional climate, a
child’s use of objects and the formation of signs and meaning are all required to
learn language, writing, calculation, drawing, and concept or meaning formation
etc. (cultural mediation)
 'Vivencia' is a term from Vygotsky that is not easy to translate but it a sense of
self, worth and confidence in response to life experiences. It in part relates to
resilience and perhaps the somewhat unfashionable notion of ‘character’ but it,
also, has a social and collective dimension. Its production enables the
sensitivity to and attribution of sensations from practical experience, which can
produce, a cohesive personal commitment to their own education and
development.
 Adults and peers participate actively in the organisation of the social and cultural
environment of the family and the school to enable the active and independent
participation of the learner in their development.

16. THE FUNDAMENTAL GOALS
 are for the child to take and learn cultural content and media awareness in order
to develop necessary emotional, motivational and psychological knowledge
which includes symbols, signs and meanings from real life. Early, preschool and
school education programmes also facilitated support and guidance for families.
 Early, preschool and primary education in Cuba aims to create a positive
emotional environment that facilitates interaction with children. It involves the
development of communicative language, encouraging children to be
independent and to work by themselves and collectively as well as the
manipulations and use of objects as tools to solve tasks.
 There is an emphasis on games of all types as well as real life roles. Working in
different modalities is encouraged through drawing and the building of graphic
and 3d models. Children are taught that words and the sounds that form them
can be represented graphically through a range of developmentally appropriate
activities.
 This leads on to the teaching and learning of writing, reading, calculation and
about the environment in which the children live.

17. SPECIAL NEEDS APPROACHES
 Approaches to meeting the special educational needs of children
build upon the above principles and priorities with some additions.
The principles that apply to the development of all children in
general must, logically, also apply to children with Special
Educational Needs.
 The process of teaching, learning and development should also
include ‘correction’ and compensation for the consequences of
biological deficits where possible and appropriate.
 Assessment should be explanatory and comprehensive but not
classificatory or descriptive based on psychometric assessment.
There will be inclusive education in mainstream schools where
the quality of education in general ensures that there is learning,
development, remediation and compensation for those children
with special educational needs

18. MAP OF CUBA

19. Yo soy un hombre sincero
De donde crece el roble