Are Private Secondary Schools Emerging in Cuba?

Are Private Secondary Schools Emerging in Cuba?
September 30, 2014
Dmitri Prieto

HAVANA TIMES — A brochure handed out in Havana's neighborhood of Vedado
offers a "package" of refresher courses for high-school students.
Parents are invited to pay between 5 CUC (Math only) and 15 CUC (Math,
Spanish, Physics and Chemistry) a month to ensure their "son or daughter
becomes a university student", calling a mobile phone number for
enrollments.

The scope of the academic packages offered catches the eye: they offer
refresher courses for the subjects mentioned as well as for the natural
sciences, in diverse combinations and at different prices. The subjects
are taught in 45-minute lessons (as in most conventional secondary
schools) according to a weekly schedule.

One wonders, in view of the way these lessons are structured, whether we
are dealing with mere refresher courses or a veritable proposal for an
alternative to Cuba's public schools.

It's clear the teachers of these refresher courses would not subject
students to exams, which would be taken by the latter in the
institutions where they "study" officially.

The quotation marks are not accidental: it is also clear that the
budding business of private lessons exists thanks to the poor quality of
public education, which can't even manage to have its students pass or
obtain good grades at the exams designed by the State
educational-methodological bureaucracy on the basis of official programs.

That is why both parents and students turn to "refresher" (or perhaps
downright private) lessons as an individual option. I see nothing wrong
in the existence of private refresher courses. But State education is in
such dire straits that these are beginning to replace the systematic
education offered at schools, in their very essence.

The offer I described above isn't the only one out there. There are
others, such as "comprehensive refresher courses", at 10 CUC a month,
offered 3 days a week (1 and a half to 2 hour lessons), for secondary
school students, which include the completion of the "assignments"
required by teachers of a wide range of subjects.

The issue becomes particularly complex when we start dealing with
university admittance exams. Those who wish to purse different kinds of
university studies must take a Mathematics, Spanish and History exams.
Some private refresher courses charge some 300 Cuban pesos (13 CUC) for
lessons (offered 3 times a week) designed to prepare you for these exams
in full.

The core problem isn't (exclusively) that of prices, but the extent to
which State education has deteriorated. Following this year's History
university admittance exam, the Ministry of Higher Education had to
offer a public statement in the news, explaining that the contents of
the exam were to be found "in textbooks" and hadn't been prepared on the
basis of the whims of the examiners.

It seems many of those aspiring to enter university who failed those
exams had complained.

When those of us who graduated years ago saw the exam questions put on
screen, they struck as the most elementary queries about facts that, it
is logical to assume, "every Cuban ought to know" about the country's
history.

Will private schools that offer an alternative to State institutions
emerge, reducing the latter to mere venues for "rituals of passage"
(examinations) for young people who wish to "go up the ladder" of their
personal education? That is the question.

Source: Are Private Secondary Schools Emerging in Cuba? - Havana
Times.org - http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=106455