Preparing citizens for a 21st century socialism: Venezuela's Bolivarian educational reforms

This paper explores the contemporary expansion of mass school education in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela under the Presidency of Hugo Chávez, in terms of the commitment to extend access to formerly excluded sectors of society, and to explicitly prepare new socialist citizens required to consolidate the Bolivarian socialist republic under construction. These themes are developed through an analysis of policy documents and interviews with Education academics, set in the broader political program advocating a “Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas”, its historical roots, and efforts to develop a “socialism for the twenty-first century”. A more detailed evaluation of the explicit political goals of Venezuela’s educational reforms follows, and tensions within and between these goals. In particular, we investigate the tensions between: 1) a centralised political and educational project and calls for local “democratic and protagonistic” participation in school organisation and curricula; 2) the nationalistic character of the Chávez´s politics and the regional element promoting Latin American integration (in the spirit of Bolivar); and 3) the envisaged formation of new socialist citizens via curricular and pedagogical reforms and the response of the existing teaching profession. This paper concludes by outlining the potential contribution of a universal, accessible and equitable system of critical education to Venezuela’s socialist project, and to broader (regional and international) attempts to prepare citizens as contributors to the construction of a more just, equitable and democratic world-system. Resolving the identified tensions in ways that maintain and further develop popular support for the political project is seen as critical to realising this potential