By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Sep 13 2005 (IPS)

Universal primary education, one of the eight Millennium Development Goals set by the United Nations in 2000, has been a reality in Cuba for so long that it essentially taken for granted, leading both parents and the authorities to shift their attention to the quality of education received by Cuban schoolchildren.

Aitana Cabrera, who turns five in October, started school early this month, attending a kindergarten class every day in the primary school located closest to her home in Havana.

For her family, seeing the little girl enter the school system was as natural as “watching her grow day by day, learning her first words or how to count to ten,” noted her mother, Raquel Pérez.

For the 39-year-old Pérez, like other Cuban mothers, the fact that her daughter is able to attend primary school is a foregone conclusion. As a result, her main concern is the quality of education she will receive. “The important thing is what kind of teacher my daughter is going to have, and if she is going to learn what she’s supposed to learn in school,” she remarked to IPS.

“The question now is no longer quantity, but rather quality. Many families have begun to pay for private tutors to ensure that their children are learning what they need to learn, and that didn’t happen ten years ago,” said Aurelio Castellanos, a 43-year-old teacher.

A month of private classes in Spanish or mathematics can cost around 40 Cuban pesos or two dollars, a high price in a country where the average monthly salary is roughly 300 pesos, and education from the primary to the tertiary level has been free for almost half a century.

Over 99 percent of Cuban children between the ages of six and eleven attend school, and practically all those who enter first grade complete their primary education and move on to secondary education, stated an official report released earlier this month.

Ensuring that all boys and girls complete a full course of primary schooling and eliminating gender disparity at all levels of education are targets set as part of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted by all United Nations member countries in 2000.

A study released in June by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), titled “The Millennium Development Goals: A Latin American and Caribbean Perspective”, reports that most of the countries of the region have no gender gap in education.

The primary school enrolment rate for Latin America and the Caribbean as a whole was 95.7 percent in 2001. In nine of the countries studied, there were more girls than boys attending secondary school, and in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Jamaica, Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago and Uruguay, there were more females than males undertaking higher education studies.

The education-related MDG targets, which are supposed to be met by all the world’s nations by the year 2015, were already achieved decades ago in Cuba.

Regardless of gender, race or social background, or whether they live in large cities or remote mountain areas, primary and secondary education are rights guaranteed to all Cuban children and teenagers.

But experience around the world has shown that once the matter of universal access to education is resolved, countries face an equally complex challenge: ensuring the quality of the school system, including the training of teaching staff.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has noted that the number of children enrolled in primary school worldwide rose from 596 million in 1990 to 648 million in 2000. Nevertheless, there were still 104 million school-aged children who were not in school that year.

According to UNESCO’s “Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2005: The Quality Imperative”, the proportion of schoolchildren in Latin America and the Caribbean who reach the fifth year of primary school is below 89 percent in half of the countries for which figures were available.

But the report further notes that secondary school enrolment in the region increased from 72 percent in 1998 to 86 percent in 2001.

The greatest problem now is not access to school. As UNESCO Director-General Koichiro Matsuura points out, it is all too common to find classrooms overflowing with students, poorly qualified teachers and schools with infrastructural deficiencies and a shortage of teaching materials.

This was the situation facing Cuba during the worst years of the economic crisis in the 1990s. In addition to material shortages, large numbers of teachers left the school system in search of better working conditions and higher salaries in other fields, leading to hugely overcrowded classrooms, especially in cities like Havana.

The shortage of teachers was solved by the introduction of intensive, short-term training courses to prepare recent secondary school graduates to teach in primary schools.

This made it possible to ensure a maximum class size of 20 students at the primary level. However, it also means that of the 38,881 teachers in the Cuban school system today, 12,553 are young and relatively inexperienced graduates of these intensive training courses.

Another recent initiative to improve the quality of primary education involved the wide-scale introduction of computers, as well as televisions and VCRs, with special curriculum materials designed for them.

To ensure that all primary school students have access to this new equipment, the government has equipped schools in remote rural areas that lack electrical power with solar panels to operate the computers, TV sets and VCRs.

President Fidel Castro acknowledged on Jul. 24 that despite all the advances made in the school system, the country is “still a long way from achieving all of the educational results” that could be hoped for.

He emphasised the need to improve the level of specialised attention to individual students, contact between schools and families, and the training of teaching staff.

Many Cuban parents agree with him. For Nadia Suárez, the mother of a 14-year-old secondary school student, the most important thing is for her daughter to have good teachers. “In the past, there were no computers or TVs in the schools, but the teachers were more demanding, and the kids had to study harder,” she maintained.

She believes that the new educational programmes and prevalence of young, inexperienced teachers often means that students are passed from one grade to the next in primary and secondary school without actually learning everything they need to. “If I just accept things the way they are, I would be compromising my daughter’s future,” she said.

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