Bad Handwriting in La Joven Cuba (11) / Regina Coyula

For Raul, the mathematician:

Education has been inadequate and we have graduated students from college who, with their in terms of meeting the requirements and quality, never should have been given a degree.

I remember how the Cuban press published such things as students in the United States did not know where Nicaragua was, or thought that the deceased was a bone in the neck. Well, a documentary is circulating with similar questions posed not to students, but to Cuban teachers. Also circulating is an email message about an assessment of 2009 students on the point of graduating. And there is another documentary where they randomly ask (including many young people) for Rosa’s Shoes by Jose Marti!

All three show the ignorance of the respondents. I work with my son who must take his entrance exams in May and who is the result of five years of sport education and the latter has not been much different. I have not been able to pay for tutors except in specific subjects, and this year, like the last, my husband and I have had to make adjustments to be able to pay at least in mathematics, but there was no one with any openings.

I myself gave classes up to the 12th grade and I narrated my experience with “General Integrated Teachers” in another post. This by way of a long introduction to show that I am aware of the issue, which worries me a lot.

… Not only in our society, but in any, participation is sometimes gained and on occasion snatched. Give us responsibility, show us what our role is, the nobility of the cause we are being asked to fight for.

Raul, as I see it, there is a contradiction in your words. If participation is gained and sometimes snatched, young people do not have to wait because no one tells them what their role is. Their intelligence, their preparation and the commitment they have acquired toward society should be justification enough to assume what they consider appropriate.

I believe that our historic leaders, being so old, are detached from the interests and aspirations of young people; they do not know what they want and can not understand because there are two generations in between them. The desire to maintain the current system (I seriously doubt that it’s about socialism), is natural for those who have tried to implement it for more than half a century, not necessarily to meet the expectations of the emerging generations, that is to deny the dialectic.

I have left out very extensive things, that I don’t like, but the post appears very interesting to me.

Many thanks.

Translator’s notes: In this series of posts Regina is re-posting comments she makes on the blog La Joven Cuba, which is a shared blog from students at Matanzas University.

April 27 2011