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Book on Cuban universities
BY JOSE A. DE LA OSA —Special for
Granma International—
THE heir to elitist universities
to which only the wealthiest layers of society had
access, and alienated from our country’s real
necessities of economic and social development,
after successive transformations, today’s
universities, since the triumph of the Revolution in
1959, has begun to make into reality that idea of
José Martí’s: “From birth, all men and women have
the right to be educated, and then, in payment, to
contribute to the education of others.”
A book that is now essential:
La Universidad cubana: el modelo de formación
(Cuban Universities: A Model for Education), by
Professor Pedro Horruitiner Silva, reveals in a
rigorous and interesting way to his readers how Cuba
has been able to build a common platform with a high
level of social participation, for all of its higher
education.
Cuba’s universities demand from
their students an integral professional comportment,
which means having solid scientific and technical
training; a broad education in the humanities;
philosophical ideas; ethical, moral and social
values in general, and a high level of social
commitment.
It is no coincidence – rather it
is a result of their education – that, for example,
thousands of Cuban doctors are lending their
services in dozens of countries, in the most remote
and poverty-stricken places, where a doctor had
never gone before, and where the doctors of their
own countries are not capable of going; or the
similar numbers of teachers carrying out the most
sacred task – educating others – in similar
conditions of poverty and distance.
As is rightly pointed out, a
concept of structure is seen throughout
Horruitiner’s book: the universalization of the
university, a gradual process of transformations
initiated in the 1960s and that is currently
concretized in the presence of the Cuban university
in every corner of the country, and that is
identified as a quality of a more general
phenomenon, which is also taking place in Cuba: the
universalization of knowledge.
Almost 50 years since the
revolutionary triumph, higher education has 65
institutions, where more than half a million young
people are studying for university degrees in 94
different specialties, all under the concept of
“broad profile,” which is the model that Cuban
universities have identified as the ideal one for
the country’s conditions of development.
During these years, more than
800,000 professionals have graduated, the equivalent
of about 7% of the total population. If we add to
that the number of current students, it is possible
to affirm that in Cuba, one of every 10 inhabitants
is a university graduate or is studying in
university.
In this book’s 249 pages, today’s
university is reviewed, as is the education process
and its characteristics; educational work from the
viewpoint of the curriculum; the universalization of
higher education; the questions of quality, access
and relevance; and the new generation of study
plans.
Professor Horruitiner is an engineer in physics and
university professor and holds a doctorate in
pedagogical sciences. Currently, he is the director
of the Department of Education for Professionals in
Cuba’s Ministry of Higher Education. |
