On education

GOOD-BY GYMNASTICS OR THE PUDDING BRIBE IS OVER

Elvia Rosa Castro

Only nine days elapsed between November 30, 1979 and December 8 of the same year. The album The Wall, produced by Harvest Record, Columbia Records and Capitol Records, was presented first in USA and then in the United Kingdom.

Next to Pink Floyd's well-known elegance, the Anglo-Saxon world was attending the launching of a classic and of that hymn that endures the passing of time, Another brick in the wall, Part II. Within the premises of the civil society, no confession had been as anarchic and irreverent as the one that states without prudery: "we don't need not education, we don't need not thought control". Antonio Gramsci had considered the school as an essential element in society for the maintenance of the status quo. In the school, the power codes are reproduced ideologically and it proves to be a sort of guarantee. Frenchman Louis Althusser ended including it among what he called State Ideological Devices, next to the Church, the trade unions, the media and the family. The school, like any repressive organ, disciplines, watches over and punishes.

It is obvious that the school is a guarantor institution that confirms what power proclaims. In 1961 our country began to carry out the heroic gesture of teaching literacy, an event which I guess all of us beyond Christ's age would have liked to attend. We would thus be fulfilling the myth that being revolutionary means achieving an unprecedented feat. It was followed by a monolithic education in which we all vibrated when shouting in unison "We will be like Che" following the slogan "Pioneers in favor of communism", and swelled with pride if we were selected for the well-known symbolical assaults to Yaguajay, Santa Clara, or the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes garrisons. That is to say, our daily feats were rewarded with replicas of a previous feat. We were—we are—as in every well-designed educational system, perfect affirmers and repeaters.    

However, the school is at the same time the stage where dissidence and discrepancy begin (there is an influence here of all kinds of visual information that the student receives through all possible ways and the exchanges with his "friends"). Later on, the school is a double-sided weapon that demands priority within the social environment, and although the teaching may be poor, the patriotic education should have no cracks. This has resulted in the search of alternatives, both in the families and in the institution itself, only that in opposite senses: while the latter monopolizes and controls, the family looks for rhizomes, for new—several—roads, to make their children understand the contents and fulfill their dreams, that telos summarized in two words: university career (at best).

The Circo project has taken due note of the issue and prepared its event on a theme that is very sensible in Cuba today. The event has been preceded by some gestures: Camila Guzmán Urzúa's failed film Telón de azúcar (Sugar Curtain); the convincing Sola. La extensa realidad (Alone. The Extensive Reality), by filmmaker Gustavo Pérez, as well as almost the entire praxis of Ana Olema Hernández (Lo que nos caracteriza) (What characterizes us). José Hidalgo entitled Seremos como el Che (We will be like Che) a red manikin dressed with militia shirt, and Luis Camnitzer writes an essay: Educación y fraude (Education and Fraud).

That gymnastics that disregarded the Greek hedonistic ideal in order to make us apt in other aspects has been vanishing. People would say: there is no mind, the bodies move all alone. But if you look well into it, neither one nor the other: to cap it all, my brother is 16 and does not know how to press-up; his chest aches.

For sure, ours ache too.

ARTICLE

Pioneros por el comunismo (detail), by José Hidalgo