Hands shoot up enthusiastically around the small class of nine-year-olds. They seem to have got the hang of the Roman numerals their teacher is chalking on the blackboard. The children could be nine-year-olds anywhere if it weren’t for their red scarves, but their teacher looks young, even for a trainee. Giraldo Del Pino, it turns out, is 16 – one of Cuba’s new breed of ’emergent teachers”.
The Cuban government’s response to soaring class sizes and a shortage of people entering the profession was to declare that from September this year no class would have more than 20 children and that it would seek 20 000 extra teachers from the ranks of 16- to 18-year-olds. They teach while carrying on with their own senior school exam courses. Starting in the capital, Havana, which faced the worst problems, the initiative has meant a huge building and refurbishment programme over the past two years as well as a recruiting effort.
In its boldness the strategy recalls the 1961 literacy campaign in which the new revolutionary government of Fidel Castro set out to eliminate illiteracy in a year, mobilising more than 200 000 volunteers, including many school and university students, to work alongside the peasant farmers, teaching them at night.
Inspiring certainly – but practical? Inside the 250-pupil Seguidores de Camilo Primary School, set in a large park in Havana, the maths lessons continue as the tropical sun grills the city. Del Pino seems on top of his material and the lesson moves forward crisply. The children are well behaved, but confident and lively – and of course their teacher has the advantage of a small class.
The next lesson is music, using an educational television broadcast introducing high and low sounds, including the sounds of different instruments. This doesn’t go quite so well. By this time Del Pino is being observed by an education adviser. The children seem less engaged – the contrast with the class next door following the same programme with an experienced teacher is telling.
After the class files out the adviser, Nivia Hinds Acosta, talks through the lesson – and suddenly Del Pino looks very young. He confesses he was very nervous but is reasonably pleased with how things have gone. Hinds Acosta is encouraging and has various recommendations.
Del Pino says he chose to become a teacher because he enjoys it and there are teachers in his family. The emergent teachers receive six months to a year’s training. They receive mentoring support from experienced teachers and continue their own studies. Del Pino follows his grade 12 course on Thursdays and Saturdays so that he can go to university.
Not surprisingly, although parents were enthusiastic about smaller classes, they were not all thrilled with the idea of their children being taught by 16-year-olds. ‘Some families were worried about the quality of these teachers but as the programme goes on these worries are diminishing,” insists Dr Jorge Corona, adviser to the education minister.
Cuba is head and shoulders above the rest of Latin America when it comes to both the quantity and quality of its education, as Unesco figures attest. Through four decades of American trade embargo – and particularly during the grim ‘special period” of the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union when 80% of its export market disappeared – Cuba has struggled to maintain its commitment to education. Corona explains: ‘It is our main capital, human capital, that has allowed us to develop our economy and resist aggression from our powerful neighbour.”
Economic pressures prevented the refurbishment of schools and meant that teachers’ wages were pegged. (Salaries are the equivalent of US a month even for experienced teachers – far less than they could earn driving taxis.) As class sizes in Havana soared to 40 or 50 there was a ‘genuine vocational crisis” in the capital, Castro said.
The response seems to embody that ‘can do” Cuban spirit. As Castro declared in a speech in September, Havana was the first city to have only 20 pupils per class – ‘something long dreamed of but never before achieved, not even by the world’s most developed countries”.
He went on: ‘At a rather early stage of your lives you will be taking on a prestigious and promising job. You will live off your own wages, earned with your own efforts and the creativity of your minds. All who propose to do so can reach the greatest heights in higher education institutions, earning masters degrees and even doctorates . . . You will enjoy your country’s gratitude and the world’s admiration.”
At a high school in the countryside outside Havana where more than 500 teenagers were training to be emergent teachers, an astonishingly confident 16-year-old, Lisandra Jimenez Diaz, explained that in December and January they would go out on teaching practice.
One of the English teachers, John Smith, says: ‘When I first heard about these children becoming teachers my first reaction was ‘poor things, they’re so young’. But after seeing them I felt I would have loved to have done that when I was 16 or 17. It leaves me with a great sense of hope – I would love to see where they are in a year’s time.”
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