Tom G. Griffiths

Schooling for twenty‐first‐century socialism: Venezuela’s Bolivarian project

The global dominance of neoliberal policy prescriptions in recent decades has been well documented, with particular implications for educational systems. These include reduced public expenditure and provision, the promotion of individual (parental) choice, competition, increased user‐pays and the privatisation of education. Against this background, this paper reviews contemporary educational reforms in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, which are moving in a counter direction. In particular, I examine the expansion of publicly funded education, and its overtly politicised objective of preparing citizens to contribute to the Bolivarian socialist project being advanced in the country. Through this counter example, I argue that the Venezuelan case highlights the potential for substantive policy alternatives to neoliberalism into the twenty‐first century.

Fifty Years of Socialist Education in Revolutionary Cuba: A World-Systems Perspective

Abstract The educational achievements of revolutionary Cuba are well documented, and of international importance given the current global struggle to achieve universal primary schooling as one of the Millennium Development Goals. Revolutionary Cuba achieved and has sustained universal access to free and secular public education at all levels, with a high degree of equity, alongside a comprehensive program of adult education and the unprecedented provision of free education and training, particularly medical training, for students of the South. This paper focuses on the less well-researched aspect of the political and ideological objectives of Cuban school education, and the ways in which these have been reflected in school structures, curricula, and pedagogical practices. Acknowledging the ongoing achievements in terms of provision and academic performance, it is argued that the project of socialising new socialist citizens through schooling has been mixed. Drawing on world-systems theorising, some fundamental features of Cuba’s school system are identified that have historically worked against such outcomes. The ensuing contradictions have been exacerbated by post-Soviet social and economic conditions and changes, producing distinct outcomes in contemporary Cuban society that pose major challenges to Cuba’s political and educational project.

Higher Education for Socialism in Venezuela: Massification, Development and Transformation

This chapter examines the reform of higher education in Venezuela, in the context of the country’s explicit program of national transformation and construction of ‘twenty-first-century socialism’. Venezuela’s break from orthodox neoliberal policy frameworks began with the election of Hugo Chavez in 1998, accelerated following his re-election in 2006 under the banner of building ‘Bolivarian socialism’. Some of the most striking reforms have been the mass expansion in enrolments via new public universities, open-access pathways to enrolment and an attempt to reconceptualise university education, its nature, content and delivery. Drawing on policy documents and data, as well as 15 months of fieldwork in Caracas over 2010–2011 by the author, this chapter identifies and elaborates some of the key characteristics of the transformation of higher education being advanced in the country and their links to the wider process of building a viable model of socialism for this century.

World Culture in the Capitalist World-System in Transition.

World culture theory (WCT) offers an explanatory framework for macro-level comparative analyses of systems of mass education, including their structures, accompanying policies and their curricular and pedagogical practices. WCT has contributed to broader efforts to overcome methodological nationalism in comparative research. In this paper, we acknowledge the contributions of world culture theory in these terms, but develop the case for an alternative explanatory framework – world-systems analysis (WSA) – rooted in the historical development and contemporary crises of the capitalist world-economy. This case is built on two major points of critique of world culture theory: first, that its consensus orientation is inadequate for a macro-level accounting of social reality; and second, that its analysis of the economic functions of mass education, in isolation from the capitalist world-economy, further weakens its explanatory power. Working from this critique, we elaborate the capacity of world-systems analysis to overcome these shortcomings by providing a more comprehensive, historical perspective. This alternative approach incorporates the identification and analysis of shared cultural understandings underpinning policy and institutional practice, linked to the development of the capitalist world-economy. We conclude this paper by affirming the value of WSA as an alternative approach for comparative research, and its potential contribution to the development of more enlightened educational policy and a more just and democratic world-system.

Educating Critical Citizens for an Alternative World-System

Referring to the institutionalist branch of global studies, whose educational variant is discussed in preceding chapters, world-systems scholars Boswell and Chase-Dunn (2000, 25) presented the interstate system as promoting and developing over time a world polity, with “shared cultural definitions of what is legitimate among states and other global actors…institutionalizing the parameters of what is a goal worth pursuing.” The ensuing world polity is both defined by and defines the operation of the interstate system, and the logics of the world-system that underpin them. Boswell and Chase-Dunn’s (2000) interest was in associated strategies for transforming the capitalist world-system by changing the world polity, or in Wallerstein’s terms, the geoculture of the world-system.

“What to do about schools?”: The Australian Radical Education Group (RED G)

Purpose – The Australian Radical Education Group (RED G) was created in June 1976, which in turn launched a magazine for radical(ising) teachers, the Radical Education Dossier (RED), that would be published for the next 30 years. The purpose of this paper is to characterise the emergence and first phase of RED’s publication up to its name change in 1984. Design/methodology/approach – The authors draw on interviews with key members of the magazine’s editorial collective, and a review of RED’s contents, to identify the major political ambitions as manifest in RED in historical context. The authors contextualise this radical education project in the post-1968 world context of social and political upheaval, rejecting the Cold War options of either Soviet style Communist or US-based capitalist pathways. Findings – In this context RED generated powerful critiques of dominant educational policy in multiple areas. The critique was part of a project to promote a socialist understanding of mass education, and to pr...

Mass Education and Human Capital in the Capitalist World-System

This chapter explores the global phenomenon of mass education and its relationship to the associated policy dimension of mass education for human capital development/formation in the capitalist world-economy. This is done here, and in the following chapter, in the spirit of this “sense of blasphemy,” seeking to better understand and in turn to challenge the dominance of this accepted paradigm.

Wallerstein’s World-Systems Analysis

Almost four decades ago, the first edition of Volume I of Immanuel Wallerstein’s The Modern World-System was published (Wallerstein: 1974a). In 2011, new editions of volumes I, II, and III were published, along with the long-anticipated fourth volume, The Modern 1789–1914. A fifth and sixth volume are scheduled, if the author can “last it out” to cover the “long twentieth century,” which will include treatment of the underlying premise of Wallerstein’s extensive corpus of work—the structural crisis of the capitalist world-economy (Wallerstein: 2011b, xvii). World-systems analysis (WSA) has from the outset developed a macro- level account of social reality, offering an explanatory framework centered on the historical establishment and development of the capitalist world-economy, and its current and future trajectories. On the question of grand narratives, Wallerstein (2011a, xxiii) remains steadfast in presenting WSA as an “alternative master narrative…[to]…the orthodox Marxist and modernization master narratives,” asserting, “We refused to throw out the baby with the bathwater.”1

Urban Education, Work, and Social Mobility in Oceania: World-Systems Patterns, and Limits, for Peripheral Zones

This chapter considers the question of urbanization and urban education in Oceania, from a world-systems analysis perspective. This is set first in the context of well-established ideas of upward social mobility through education, and how this logic has extended historically to the idea of nations, and even regions, experiencing upward mobility in the world-economy, in part through investments in education. The chapter then reviews a world-systems analysis perspective on the question of urbanization as a global historical trend linked to the relocation of production from core to semi-peripheral and peripheral states within the world-economy. This extends to the long-term move towards fully proletarianised labour associated with growing urbanization, and the nature of the relocated production activity maintaining flows of global surplus to the core. On this basis, we argue that understanding urbanization, and urban education, work and social mobility in the geographical region of Oceania, requires an historical view that locates these processes within the secular trends of the capitalist world-economy. The particular histories of nation-states in Oceania, as former colonies, providers of raw materials and cheap labour to international commodity chains, shifts attention to the world-system and its transformation in understanding regional developments.

Education for Social Transformation: Soviet University Education Aid in the Cold War Capitalist World-System

International education is seen as an effective form of soft power. This article reviews one of history’s largest and most ambitious attempts to achieve global influence through university education, and to reshape the world—the Soviet university aid program, 1956–91. Drawing on existing research and Soviet archival materials, we lay out and contextualize characteristic features of the Soviet education aid program. Specifically, we identify its focus on students from “developing” and newly independent countries, and its ambition to form graduates who would return home to become national leaders sympathetic to Soviet socialism. We conclude by approaching the program from a world-systems perspective. Here, we highlight the intended catch-up style modernization and national economic development for countries through their participation in the Soviet university aid program as well as the intended development of the human capital of participant countries. The complex impacts on participants throughout the world and their subsequent worldview are the subject of ongoing research by the authors.