Cuba: Perspectiva histórica en la formación de Maestros

Abstract

From an historical perspective the teachers training in Cuba reveals profound changes after the revolution of 1959 and up to 1971 with the Congress of Education and Culture. The policy of massification of education was produced in a context of increasing personal power of the “maximum leader” who was facing imperialist threats and the loss of autonomy of Cuban civil society. The substitution of the normal schools for teachers training for institutions of an improvised nature called makarenkos (1962) and others, was based on the so-called “parameters” which, to be implemented, demanded proceedings of a repressive pedagogy. The Congress of Education and Cultures (1971) meant the consolidation of this educational policy and culminated with the transformation of the role of the teacher as trainer of the new generations, such as had been promulgated by the University Reform, to that of controler and repressor of conducts which were considered undesirable by the revolutionary command. This education was directed towards producing subjects who were fearful of any thinking that was not that which came from political discourse whereas in the heart of the family the demands of daily life required another education, giving place to what has popularly been called, a double moral. A moral governed by the “orientations” of the discourse of the moment of the maximum leader, reduced to political spheres of the centre of work and study, and another at the heart of the family and between close friends. However, this latter transgressive moral order went against that of the official moral and was never exposed in public places, reflecting the disencounter between the educative processes without any dialogue: the school and the home. This context of education explains the rupture with a pedagogical tradition that had been keeping up the ties between intellectual production and education.