Meanwhile, UNESCO Chief Is Romancing Cuban Education
When UNESCO — the UN’s Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization — admitted the Palestinian Authority as a full member last year, the decision triggered a U.S. law that forbids American funding of any UN outfit that grants the Palestinians membership before they reach a negotiated peace deal with Israel. Since then, UNESCO’s Director-General Irina Bokova has been campaigning, not for UNESCO’s member states to reverse the admission of the Palestinians, but for U.S. authorities to override America’s own laws in order to resume sending upwards of $78 million per year to her UN shop.
With the Palestinian Authority rolling ahead, indifferent to U.S. objections, toward a vote in the UN General Assembly that would upgrade its status on the UN General Assembly’s books from observer to non-member observer state, UNESCO may make a fresh push for the U.S. to find a way around its own laws, in order to reopen the tax dollar spigots for UNESCO’s coffers. There are plenty of good reasons why America should not do this, starting with respect for America’s own laws, versus UNESCO’s appetite for U.S. cash. The Heritage Foundation’s Brett Schaefer makes a sound case (disclaimer: along with his own reporting, he cites some of mine) that the U.S. would do better, a la President Reagan, to simply withdraw from the self-serving, poorly performing UNESCO — which does a much better job of thumbing its nose at U.S. interests and providing for its plushly over-staffed offices in Paris than of serving its erstwhile clientele in the world’s poorer countries.
Here’s one more item for the list. While the U.S. headlines have been focused on such pressing matters as violence in the Middle East, and the domestic wrangle over taxes, UNESCO’s chief, Irina Bokova, has just dropped in on Cuba, whence UNESCO’s media services report she has been lavishing praise on the minister of education. UNESCO reports that Bokova “expressed her appreciation to the Minister for the long-standing state policy to give the highest priority to education.” Bokova also “congratulated the Minister” on Cuba being the only country of the Latin American and Caribbean region to achieve the goal of the UNESCO-led program called Education for All.
That sure sounds commendable. Except, what’s the real condition of schooling in Cuba? What is this system that Bokova has just praised as the educational Eden of Latin America and the Caribbean?
Washington-based Freedom House features Cuba among the “Worst of the Worst” in its list of “The World’s Most Repressive Societies.” Cuba is one of eight nations “whose ratings fall just short of the bottom of Freedom House’s ratings scale.” (Slightly better, in other words, than the likes of North Korea and Sudan). Of Cuba’s system of education, Freedom House reported just this past July: ”The government restricts academic freedom. Teaching materials for subjects including mathematics and literature must contain ideological content.” Freedom House further reports, in an observation of clear relevance to anything resembling modern education, that “Access to the internet remains tightly controlled, and it is difficult for most Cubans to connect from their homes. The estimated internet penetration is less than 3 percent.”
On top of that, under the Castro dictatorship, which has lasted more than 40 years, first under Fidel and now under his brother, Raul, Cuba remains a place where all media are owned or controlled by the state, there is no freedom of assembly (at least not for more than three people at a time), and censorship is the rule. All political organizing outside of the Communist Party of Cuba is illegal… “Political dissent, whether spoken or written, is a punishable offense, and dissidents frequently receive years of imprisonment for seemingly minor infractions”…”Official corruption remains a serious problem.” And, should any students within the Cuban education system aspire to broaden their horizons by traveling abroad, they’d better make sure they have a neat clean record of toeing the Party line, because “Attempting to leave the island without permission is a punishable offense.”
For Bokova, who in an earlier incarnation served as a communist apparatchik at the Bulgarian mission to the UN in New York, the Cuban school system may have a certain familiar allure. But if she comes knocking again on the doors of Capitol Hill, asking U.S. lawmakers to find a way around America’s own laws in order to bankroll UNESCO’s projects, let’s hope those lawmakers take note that the problems with UNESCO are hardly confined to the Palestinians. For UNESCO, it appears that the paragon of education in Latin America and the Caribbean is the system of Cuba — stifled by censorship, drenched in Castroite communist ideology, starved of free access to the Internet, and run by officials who have risen to the top of one of the world’s worst of the worst regimes. Congratulations?
Education for All is basic skills at a fairly minimal level plus the right attitudes, values, and beliefs. Horrifically enough the primary enforcer for EFA globally are the accreditation agencies using a poorly understood process called Quality Assurance and Accountability. Both are compliance with a collectivist political agenda. The Cold War basically morphed into its monopoly over education in the West to live again to fight another day while no one was looking or even knew there was a problem.
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/oh-good-grief-now-i-need-to-know-what-a-noetic-system-is-because-it-is-under-attack/ is a good over view of what UNESCO is up to in education to pursue its actual political and economic vision. Julian Huxley when he created UNESCO knew that if you could change the prevailing values, attitudes, and beliefs (the UN definition of culture), you could change a society much like Uncle Karl wanted in the first place.
I recognized Irina from Michael Barber’s work with her. Pearson’s Ed Chief. They are influencing every classroom any reader knows of.
invisibleserfscollar.com was exactly what was coming to mind as I was reading this. Having been on the edges of the education industrial complex since 1983, I have watched the ever encroaching political purposes hobble learning and teaching. Thank you, Ms.Rosett, for alerting the wider audience.
Ah complete state control of the media and the internet, is there anything in this world that excites liberals more than this idea? They were so close for several years but they have lost control of the dang internet. Must be really frustrating since one of their own invented it.
I am sure Mme. Bokovs’s opinion of Cuban education is shared by Charman BHO’s friendly neighbor in HydePark, Bill Ayers, widely extolled in Communist nations as the outstanding authority on indoctrinating children into the Marxist cause, the specialty he has devoted his affluent life to since he decided that bombing post offices and police station was going to be more harmful than helpful to his life and cause. Hugo Chavez is a great fan of his. He is probably the guy who gave Hugo the idea that he would be warmly embraced by his Comrade Barry when they got together.
Ayers keeps a low profile but there can be little doubt that he is the person that Obama would REALLY like to have in the Education seat in his Cabinet. He is also probably one of the reasons the White House won’ t release visitor lists.
The pernicious stranglehold of leftists is the reason why our current educational system is far worse than having none at all.
Education versus indoctrination: It’s one or the other, not both!
I think it is important to recognize that Cuba’s schools system does part of its process well. Cuban primary students generally score well above other Latin American countries according to data from OREALC and they did so well that the question was raised as “Cuba’s Academic Advantage: Why Students in Cuba Do Better in School By Martin Carnoy, Amber K. Gove, Jeffery H. Marshall
I asked that question myself upon seeing the data. The most probable answer is that the test that was used evaluated basic functioning in language and mathematics which are subjects that Cuba managed to teach mostly with rote learning under conditions of strong control with better than avergae teachers (who taught because it was a way to get a decent job when very few other jobs were available). Nothing about world history, about alternate political systems, just see if they can add and subtract. The results were good and UNESCO has been crowing about them for about 15 years.
I located my original piece on how accreditation is being used globally to push UNESCO’s anti-individual, anti-freedom, vision for education to get us back to the yokes we thought were gone forever.http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/is-accreditation-the-enforcer-for-unescos-vision-of-solidarity/
Civilization is indeed a fragile thing.
Stuart-Ayers is called a Neo Stalinist precisely because , like Gramsci, he believes you can subjugate a society in all aspects by taking over its cultural and political institutions. I wrote a post back in August called “Priming Delicate Minds for a Desired Disruptive Revolution, What is the Real Damage?” It used the vision of Ayers’ less well-known mentor, Maxine Greene, to lay out the new vision of “morality” she, Ayers, Linda Darling-Hammond, and A stanford prof, Nel Noddings, are pushing. Noddings is one of the advisors on Australia’s Student Wellbeing push as a focus for the classroom that is also originating in the UN. She also wrote the Foreword for Riane Eisler’s “Caring Economics” push that was funded by Dag Hammarskold’s foundation. Also tied to UN.
Claudia-the Bulgarian link is very helpful.
My favorite comment on UNESCO comes from Robert Conquest. They celebrated the 100th anniversary of Ho Chi Minh’s birth with a lavish party.
UNESCO is also an active partner in the Future Earth Alliance that goes operational in 2013. And there are no superheroes in tights.
What else to expect from her? Irina Bokova is a member of the prominent Bulgarian communist family Bokovi. Bulgarian communists and Cuban communists maintain personal relationships from the times when Bulgaria was communist state.