The Year Cuba Closed the Schools to Teach the Countryside to Read — Epoche B1
In 1961 Cuba closed its secondary schools for a year and sent brigades of teenage volunteers into the countryside to teach adults to read. The year has a shape, and it is worth following in order. It began with counting. Teams went house to house to find out who could not read and where those people lived, because a campaign cannot be aimed at a number; it has to be aimed at addresses. Then came the volunteers. Around a hundred thousand of them, many aged thirteen or fourteen, trained briefly and sent out with a uniform, a paraffin lamp for houses with no electricity, a primer and a manual for the teacher. They did not visit. They lived in the households they taught, worked in the fields during the day, and taught at night by that lamp. By December the campaign was declared complete. Each learner wrote a letter — usually to Fidel Castro — as the proof that the lessons had taken, and the country reported that illiteracy had fallen from roughly a quarter of adults to under four per cent in twelve months. What can a single year leave behind? Less than the number suggests, and more than the sceptics expect. Reading learned in a few months fades quickly if there is nothing to read, which is why Cuba followed the campaign with adult classes and cheap printed books for years afterwards. The campaign taught the letters; the decade had to keep the habit alive. Still, the belief it broke is worth keeping in mind. Literacy is not only a slow product of better schools. It can also be a thing a country decides to do, in one year, with lamps. References Kozol, J. (1978). A new look at the literacy campaign in Cuba. Harvard Educational Review, 48(3), pp. 341-377. UNESCO (1965). Report on the Method and Means Utilized in Cuba to Eliminate Illiteracy. Paris: UNESCO.