Entrance Exams An Assessment of Education in Cuba

Entrance Exams: An Assessment of Education in Cuba / Yoani Sanchez
Posted on June 6, 2013

They're no longer dressed in blue uniforms and some boys even show off
their rebellious manes. Hair that no teacher will demand they cut — at
least for the next few weeks — hair that will ultimately fall to the
razor of Obligatory Military Service. They still look like students, but
very soon many of them will be marching with rifles slung over their
shoulders. They are young men who just, days ago, finished their school
days at different high schools all over Cuba. The college entrance exams
are long past and this week they've learned who will have a place in
higher education.

Just outside the schools, the lists of the accepted and unaccepted speak
for themselves. José Miguel Pérez High school — in the Plaza of the
Revolution municipality — could be a good example to explain the
situation. This educational center is one of the best performing high
schools in the capital. A situation partly due to the professional and
economic composition of the neighborhood, which means many parents can
afford after-school tutors (we refer to these as "dishtowels" — they
clean things up). Despite these advantages, the end-of-year statistics
for this school are more alarming than satisfying.

Of 233 12th grade students in this high school, 222 took the entrance
exams and only 162 managed to pass all tests. The rest will have to go
to a second round, or content themselves with failure. The highest
number of low marks was in Math, in which only 51 students achieved a
score of between 90 and 100 points. In the applications for careers,
teaching specialties are repeatedly put down as a back-up choice; "To
guarantee getting a place, even if the tests don't go well," these
potential teachers of tomorrow say, with a certain indecency.

The beginning and end (?) of a mistake

The young people who completed secondary school this year are the
products of the educational experiments led off by the so-called Battle
of Ideas. They are 17 and 18 today, so they started junior high as the
"Emergent Teachers" program was gaining strength, a program that put
hastily trained young people barely out of their teens — if that — at
the front of the classroom. Today's graduates were educated in
classrooms where television and VCRs were the protagonists, for lack of
sufficiently trained teachers. At the most difficult times they could
count on receiving at least 60% of their classes from a screen. They
also went through puberty at a time of rising ideological
indoctrination. While it is true that this has always been inherent in
teaching in Cuba over the past five decades in, its climax came after
the Elian Gonzalez case. Fidel Castro took advantage of that event in
the late nineties to impart a twist to the political discourse in all
aspects of national life.

Those who graduated from the twelfth grade a few weeks ag, are the first
batch who did not have to go to boarding schools in the countryside.
Encouraging news for the young people themselves and especially for
their parents. However, the readjustment for teachers caused by the
change forced many of them to rethink careers based on study, books and
binders. The teachers who came from these schools in the countryside had
to adapt to new conditions. Despite the difficulties of the former
regime of internment, for the teachers these countryside schools were
sites of direct contact with the farmers who sold or traded for
agricultural products. One of the few incentives for working in such a
place was being able to take some bananas, taro, pork or fruit to the
city at a much cheaper price than in the markets of Havana. The loss of
that little privilege discouraged some teachers from continuing on the
path of teaching.

Memorize or question?

The countless hours lost in the classroom to teacher absenteeism is
another of the hallmarks of recent graduates. To this we have to add the
decline of the investigative character of science instruction, due to
the deterioration or absence of chemistry, physics and biology labs. In
many high schools chemistry experiments were practically canceled due to
the shortages and fear that students would have access to the chemicals.
Physical education, computer science and English were the biggest losers
in the exodus of teachers to other areas of employment. High school
education emphasized rote learning of dates, names, events, without
progress in creating their own opinions, a spirit of asking questions,
or the capacity of discernment. Graduates can hold in their heads the
years and important days of our country's history, but fail to form
their own opinion about what it all means.

The quality of handwriting, spelling and the correct use of Spanish also
fell short as educational objectives. This coming September, university
classrooms will see students with serious deficiencies in all three
areas. But that does not mean that they will be faced with excessive
demands or be unable to complete their programs of study. They will
attend a University whose quality of teaching is far from that once
exhibited in Cuba. In the 2013 ranking of Latin American universities,
the University of Havana fell from position 54 to 81, another sign
pointing to the urgent need to review the entire educational model. The
educational level of the new entrants to higher education, has forced
them to lower the bar.

The tinkering with the alchemy of learning, the successive experiments
marked more by the voluntarism than scientific analysis, the excessive
presence of ideology in every subject, the encouragement of docile,
rather than questioning, minds, students' limited access to updated
materials (read internet) and the educational fraud that flourishes
where ethics is absent, are all undermining one of the main pillars of
national identity: that which consists of knowledge, academics and
teaching. But a problem can not be remedied unless we confess that it
exists. So while they continue speaking in a triumphalist tone about
Cuban education, it will continue to sink into mediocrity, into material
and pedagogical deterioration.

6 June 2013

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