The counterrevolution in Nicaraguan education

Monthly Review, Feb, 1992 by Michael Friedman

ANDEN is not the only organizations struggling to protect and extend the revolution's gains in the area of education. However, ANDEN's struggles "are much more oriented toward labor and social demands than to pedagogical and educational demands," said Katherine Grigsby, "although they've certainly criticized the new educational program." Grigsby argued for "greater organization in order to be able to contribute to an educational project more coherent with Nicaraguan reality."

Katherine Grigsby is now the Assistant Director of the Nicaraguan Institute for Popular Investigations and Education (INIEP). Hers is one of several organizations that, "rather than confronting governmental education policy, are working in two ways: to provide a distinct alternative to the government program for certain sectors of the population, and to offer a series of educational projects and actions to large numbers of people who no longer have access to the education system for economic reasons."

INIEP, the Nicaraguan Environmental Movement, the Center for Health Research and Education, the Community Movement, the Farmworkers Association, the Nicaraguan Women's Association, the Christian literacy organization ALFALIT, and the AIDS education group IMOWATZIN have formed a network. "We're implementing educational projects linked to integral community development. That is, not education for its own sake, but education for life, for survival. For example, our literacy project is linked to health and the environment: health because of the enormous increase in infant mortality, post-partum deaths, and malnutrition, and the environment because of the deterioration of the environment and because many people don't know how to make sustained use of the few natural resources they have access to.

"We're beginning to see education from another perspective, an education that not even we offered in the past. We think this is civil society's way of making its own important educational spaces."

NOTES

1. Darwin Juarez, "Reforma o Contrareforma Educativa" (28 July 1990;

unpublished address). 2. "The New Exorcist," Barricada International, 8 September 1990, p. 21.

(*) For example, the sixth grade Morality and Civics reader, referring to the Sixth and Ninth Commandments, warns children: "With these two Commandments, God teaches us that sexual relations outside marriage are illicit." Further explaining, it adds that, "Modesty and chastity are great qualities. The lack of modesty causes temptations, sin, and scandal. We should be respectable by being modest in the way we dress, avoiding clothes or poses that stimulates sexual desire in others."

"Marriage," continues the reader, "for its importance and dignity, is meant to be indissoluble. In religious matrimony, the couple declare themselves united "until death do us part."

The schoolbook also appeals to the Law of God to reject the right to abortion: "After looking at the theme of responsible paternity, we must speak about abortion, because there are people who do it to avoid having a child. Although those who promote abortions use many arguments, the truth is the Law of God prohibits taking the life of another human being: |Thou shalt not kill,' orders the Ten Commandments."