Open access and sustainable development

"Being educated is the only way of being free"
José Martí

Summary

This paper argues that education, particularly higher education, is a key element in advancing towards a sustainable social development that, in its turn, will promote social integration. Within contemporary conditions, differences in access to education and thus knowledge, constitute the principal sources of inequity, injustice, inequality and social exclusion. A process currently underway in Cuba, which we have denominated the universalisation of higher education, has made it possible to attain a gross rate of university matriculation in excess of 60%. This process of universal higher education constitutes an important educational and social experiment with very few precedents, at least in the Latin American and Caribbean countries. Its advance poses formidable practical and theoretical challenges. For that reason it is important to carefully study its advances and contradictions. This article is one of the first attempts to systematize this experience (1). We shall briefly outline the antecedents of the current process of universalisation, discuss its most outstanding characteristics and, with practical examples, demonstrate the opportunities offered to local development by the creation of university campuses in all the municipalities of the country.

Download the pdf version

universal_higher_education

Versión español

universal_education.esp

Knowledge, education and sustainable social development

It is commonplace to talk of the fact that we live in the 'information society'. However, from the perspective of the nations of the South, the issue is not so simple. Knowledge, placed at the centre of economic competition and the relations of power, is experiencing a clear tendency to private appropriation and concentration in companies, regions and countries. Above all in the context of neo-liberal domination, knowledge has been submerged in a legal, institutional, economic and military web that cancels the condition of public well-being traditionally attributed to it.

However, at the present time, knowledge, research and technological advance are highly significant in any development strategy. From a social perspective the key questions are: knowledge and higher education to what end? Knowledge and higher education for whom? In function of what social objectives are higher education policies, policies of production, diffusion and application of knowledge directed?

Despite the modest advances that the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC, 2006) acknowledges for the four-year period 2003-06 in relation to the reduction of poverty and unemployment, plus an improvement in income distribution based on information reported by certain Latin American and Caribbean countries, statistics reveal that in 2005, 39.8% of the population were living in conditions of poverty (209 million people) and 15.4% of the population (81 million people) were living in extreme poverty or destitution. Latin America remains a kingdom of social inequality. That pattern of polarisation between wealth and poverty is a function of generalised education shortcomings that include a high degree of illiteracy and the still notably exclusive nature of higher education. In current conditions, inequalities in access to knowledge and education are becoming the primordial source of inequality and social exclusion. Access to higher education in Latin America and the Caribbean continues to be notably restricted and barely democratic (Souza Santos, 2006).

We assume that development strategies proposed to overcome such problems should offer educational opportunities to all citizens as a fundamental road to social inclusion and the advance towards higher goals of equity and social justice. People, human beings and the improvement of their quality of life, must constitute the principal objective of such transformations. But, at the same time, it is those people who can, in the final analysis, become fundamental agents in the desired transformations. That dialectic, which integrates the double condition of agents and beneficiaries, is only possible if people have access to education, including advanced education and, via that, can extend their possibilities of social participation and their leading role in the deployment of productive and innovative capacities based on wide-ranging processes of the social appropriation of knowledge (Nuñez et al, 2006b) in which accessible higher education for all plays a primordial role.

One could surmise that universal access to quality higher education constitutes a desirable and probably necessary goal for advancing development projects of a wide social reach. In Cuba, the strategy for achieving this is known as the higher education universalisation process.

The objective of this is linked to what is a prolonged debate about access to higher education. The World Conference on Higher Education (UNESCO 1998) emphasised the need to achieve a veritable equality of access, based on merit and capacity, with no discrimination in terms of ethnic origin, gender, language, religion or economic, cultural or social circumstances, or physical disability, and its opening up to anyone who has satisfactorily completed secondary education without distinction of age.

While acknowledging the value of these formulations, the objective of universalisation makes it obligatory to take things a lot further. It is evident that people do not have equal opportunities for developing merit and capacity. The massification of higher education, as is has been conceived of to date, has not prevented the persistence of discrimination for these and other reasons. The formula "as far as possible" suggests access options that could remain very limited.

The universalisation of higher education essentially requires public policies that will promote it. States and governments have fundamental roles to play in order to facilitate access, permanence in and graduation from higher education.In conjunction with this, universalisation needs to notably extend training spaces, learning spaces, approximating these as closely as possible to people's living and work scenarios. It is difficult to imagine a significant growth of access without an overflow of traditional university sites and the transformation of teaching methods. As we shall demonstrate later, universalisation is a process that requires an ample social participation.

Universalisation thus demands another vision of training, teaching and learning processes. It probably also demands an alternative vision of the idea of quality. Quality and massivity are frequently assumed as mutually exclusive concepts. Since inequality of access to quality education necessarily implies inequality in other social spheres, it is our view that the question of quality of university studies must incorporate as one objective the inclusion of all social sectors.

In Cuba, education has occupied an important place on the political agenda. In the following section we shall outline the antecedents of the current process of universalisation from that perspective.

The social politics of knowledge

In 1959, a process of profound social transformations was set in motion in Cuba, the socialist objectives of which were officially announced in 1961. One of the key characteristics of the social programme instigated and one of its principal contexts was the implementation of what we shall call a 'social policy of knowledge' (Núñez and Figaredo, 2007).

That policy had its basic starting point in the 1961 Literacy Campaign. That was followed by measures such as the nationalisation of teaching, free access to education, and a wide-ranging policy of publishing and distributing books free of charge. Mass scholarship plans made access to education possible for students from all parts of the country and any social background. The development of adult education, training programmes for campesinos - particularly women - were some of many actions to provide mass access to education.

The University Reform of 1962 (Higher Council of Universities, 1962) was a significant landmark in that early policy instigated by the Cuban government. It profoundly modified degree courses and study plans, incorporated scientific research and created a close link between theory and practice within university education.

We are talking of a social policy of knowledge because this has been a deliberate strategy, sustained and promoted by the highest levels of government and directed towards the extension of the benefits of knowledge to all Cubans. It consists of building strategies directed at the production, appropriation, diffusion and application of knowledge; at strengthening its institutional bases; and defining agendas that project objectives and priorities of wide-ranging and positive social impact. That policy has continued in place to date, expressed in the educational and cultural transformations that the country is currently undertaking.The existence of a social policy of knowledge is what makes possible the process of the social appropriation of knowledge and affords knowledge a wide social function. The universalisation of higher education can be understood as one expression of that policy.

The universalisation of higher education

The universalisation of higher education can be considered as a strategy developed since the initial years of the triumph of the Revolution. In 1957 President Fidel Castro stated: "One cannot conceive of solving future problems if knowledge is not universalised." That idea was based on the conviction that "in the future every productive process or service in the country will require a considerable degree of knowledge." And hence, the need for universal university education: "It will take us a long time before making the final leap, which will be university education. And it won't be a leap; it will be the result of earlier leaps. Because once we have succeeded in making universal education a reality up to sixth form level, the step toward universalising university education will naturally flow from that" (Castro, 1957.

The universalisation of higher education must be understood as a systematic process of increasing access opportunities to higher education and the multiplication and extension of knowledge as a vehicle for cultural development, citizens' education, technical training, all linked to the objectives of equity and social justice proposed by our society. In the 1960s that policy was expressed in the establishment of free university education and the aforementioned creation of a scholarship system that extended options for study to the poorest sectors of the population in every province of the country. In the 1970s there was a significant increase in workers' access to higher education.

In the 1976-77 academic year there was at least one Institute of Higher Education (IES) in 10 of the country's 14 provinces, and branches of these were functioning in the others. Teaching units were set up in the goods and service sectors as a way of integrating training and production. In July 1976 the Ministry of Higher Education was founded, with responsibility for directing educational policy at this level of teaching. Its creation gave impetus to university studies throughout the country. At the end of 1979 Distance Education was implemented, thus further extending sources and means of access to university studies. The IES network continued to grow in the 1980s, and university enrolment in the 1986-87 academic year reached a total of 310,000 students.

In the first half of the 90s, faced with a contraction in demand for graduates related to the acute economic crisis that the country was confronting, there was a gradual reduction in undergraduate student enrolment. In parallel, the IES network continued to expand, to reach its current total of 65 institutes, thus facilitating access to most higher education courses in all the provinces. In that decade postgraduate education (Fernández and Núñez, 1996) was notably extended and significant efforts in the area of research and innovation began to take off (Núñez and Pérez, 2007). However, the contraction in university entrance led to a significant group of young people without access to higher education - which was in contradiction with the universal higher education policy of the former decades and also generated forms of exclusion and inequality that brought into question the values defended since the social project was first introduced.

New social and educational programmes

In the early part of 2000, after the worst period of the economic crisis had been overcome, the need to attend to training needs - accumulated and new - in the education, health and social work spheres could be addressed. To that end, a conjunction of social and education programmes were created to train social workers, assistant teachers, assistant teachers in computation, secondary school assistant teachers, arts instructors, physical education teachers, assistant nurses and health technicians. A growing number of young people were incorporated into these programmes with the idea that they could subsequently move on to higher education courses. Through the Integral Retraining Course for Young People (CSIJ), directed at young people without labour or educational attachments, more than 100,000 young adults aged 17-29 were reincorporated into education.

In 2002 the country began to implement a radical restructuring process within the sugar-cane industry. Out of 155 mills, 71 remained active, leaving the enormous challenge of converting the 84 sugarcane agribusinesses into agricultural, cattle-raising and forestry farms, and of redeploying some 100,000 people with basic secondary or technical education levels into training schemes, or university courses, preferably within the technical sciences.

Within a short space of time, those advances began to put great pressure on the higher education system. It soon became apparent that the new demand could not be assimilated via traditional formulas. The changes that followed gave rise to a new stage in universal higher education, with the fundamental participation of the four principal higher education agencies: the Ministry of Education (MES) with a leading methodological role; the Ministry of Education (MINED); the Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP); and the National Institute of Sports and Recreation.

Bases of universalisation in its present stage

The new stage of universalising higher education required certain strategic decisions. The first was to break through the traditional university campus model and extend learning spaces via the creation of municipal university sites (SUM) - branches located in major municipalities and other venues close to places where people live and work. The following table shows the growth of the number of sites.

Table 1. Sites per course year

Of an initial figure of 390 in the course year 2002-03, the number increased to 3,150 in the course year 2005-06. The rapid growth of the number of sites is due to subsequent decisions that have transferred a large sector of medical and teacher-training courses to municipal facilities (polytechnics and schools).

The second strategic decision consisted of subordinating municipal university campuses to the Institutes of Higher Education (IES) existing in the provinces. With that step, each course developed in the SUMs is directed by and under the care of the faculties located in the corresponding IES, and the full utilisation of all the experience accumulated in the IES network is assured. This combination of the central sites and the SUM is now known as the New University. The New University incorporates the central university sites with their traditional structures and teaching and research activities: careers, research and study centres, Master and Doctorate programmes, plus traditions and training capacity formed over decades or centuries.

The third strategic decision was that of recruiting professionals resident in the municipalities as part-time teaching staff while completing their training on educational courses to enable them to teach within the educational model conceived for the SUM. In 2002, 39,398 teachers were incorporated into the SUM, and by the 2006-07 course year, their number had risen to 114,060, 94,375 of them part-time. Professors and students at the central university campuses likewise collaborate in the SUM.

To summarize, the new stage of universal education has been made possible by a combination of factors, including:

1) The existence of a significant group of students, many of them incorporated into important social programmes, with the possibility of moving on to higher education studies.

2) The state decision to provide the basic resources needed to develop this programme (infrastructure, text-books, video cassettes, VCR's, computers, televisions and management and coordination capacity at municipal level during this period).

3) The 800,000 university graduates in the country and their distribution throughout the entire national territory.

4) The available educational infrastructure.

5) A computer training system covering 600 community centres for studying computation with trained teachers, known as the Computer Youth Clubs.

6) An expanding national computer network that has taken optic fibres to virtually all the country's municipalities.

7) The social capital available (see Putnam and Goss, 2002; Putnam, Leonard and Nanneti, 1994); in other words, the great potential of cooperation, solidarity and integration of the agents involved - the IES, governments, social organisations, enterprises - on the basis of shared confidence, values and objectives that facilitate the mobilisation of existing resources and coordinated implementation.

As a result of the new opportunities of access to higher education, 685,600 people are currently studying on 94 courses (the gross matriculation rate in higher education for the population aged 18-24). In the SUM, 528,442 students are enrolled in 47 courses covering Humanities and Social Science, Economy, Technical Science (including Informatics), Medicine, Teacher Training and those linked to Physical Education and Sports. The following table shows the changes that have occurred in SUM enrolments.

Table 2. Enrolment totals and courses per year

One of the greatest challenges of universalisation in its new stage is to ensure that students, the majority of whom are both working and studying, continue with and complete their studies. To that end the teaching method adopted for universities has some unique characteristics, for example:

1) A focus on holistic development through professional preparation and scientific-technical training; humanities; political and ideological development; conduct based on values; as well as independence, creativity, and a high degree of social commitment.

2) Flexibility. Students enrol in subjects that they have the ability to study and pass, taking into consideration their other commitments, personal situations and assimilation capacity.

3) Student-centred activities: in other words, encouraging the capacity for self-education and independent study. The efforts of teachers and tutors are aimed at stimulating students' motivation, which is fundamental here.

Universal higher education is also stimulating the retraining of professionals living in different areas and currently working as part-time teachers. The consequences of these transformations in the context of local development are significant. Without any doubt, they are benefiting the social and cultural life of the municipalities. Their impact can be perceived as much at community level as at individual and family level. New perspectives are being opened up for the social and professional development of young people via their access to higher levels of education and culture, and the potential is being created for the transformation of the social and material life of each province. The municipalities are now assuming a more active role in training the professionals that they need for their development.

The first graduation of SUM students was in July 2007. In the provinces of City of Havana and Matanzas, where this programme began in the 2001-02 course year, 479 graduates completed their studies. In the final exercise, which took the form of a state examination or the presentation of a thesis, professors - including those from central campuses - confirmed students' competence in the professions for which they were trained and their capacity of analysis in terms of addressing relevant social problems. These graduates were assessed as demonstrating a level equivalent to those educated by more traditional methods in the universities and this is reflected in the fact that the degrees of both groups have the same legal value.

The benefits could prove to be even greater. In the following section we shall explore another dimension in which universal education is contributing to sustainable social development based on knowledge.

Knowledge, innovation and local development

A large number of university graduates in the provinces are working in the SUMs. No other provincial institution brings together that human potential. As opposed to the earlier IES, local development is the principal objective of the SUM. Given this factor the possibility arises for them to become catalysing agents for local development processes, based on their capacity for sharing knowledge and generating innovations.

On the other hand, the country has an urgent need to mobilize its productive potential, particularly in areas such as food production, housing projects, energy savings and the generation of alternative sources of energy. There is also ample space for improving public administration systems. Universities and higher education research centres possess most of the knowledge and technology needed to attend to these needs and a number of networks generated by them are operating in dozens of the country's municipalities. Linked into those groups, the SUM can actively collaborate, for example, in technology transfer projects, including the learning processes associated with them.

These experiences are very recent and it is early days in terms of evaluating them. But there are interesting examples that indicate short-term gains. We have selected some of them to illustrate this point.

In the Camajuaní municipality (2) in conjunction with local agencies and the collaboration of the Las Villas Central University and international support, the SUM is undertaking an unusual experiment which has contributed to the construction and functioning of a local network for the handling of knowledge, directed toward meeting social needs. An initial participative diagnosis was undertaken with local agencies to identify the area's principal needs: the production of food and construction materials, and housing; the development of local industry; training and computerization; water and energy. Studies undertaken demonstrate that economic and social changes in the municipality have had a negative impact on the environment.

Camajuaní is an agricultural municipality based on the cultivation of sugar cane, tobacco and mixed crops, with a significant number of medium and small industries, some of which are known for the quality and tradition of their products. Experiences in food production have been highly successful via work with the municipal agricultural production cooperatives. The SUM can contribute to that effort, among other reasons because it runs three agrarian courses with an enrolment of 144 students, and has 14 full-time and 195 part-time professors. Work with the cooperatives has included: conservation and soil rehabilitation programmes, biodiversity protection, food conservation, environmental education, community-based retraining and creating local 'campesino to campesino' promoters.

The utilisation of agro-ecological technologies in the cooperatives has marked the beginning of their sustainable, economic and ecological development. Today, the farms are demonstrating a more intensive and sustainable use of land, apparent in the number of species handled and the greater content of organic material. Campesinos are improving production levels, thus improving their own economic and social conditions. The dominant patterns of production and consumption that contributed to environmental deterioration have been changed, biological diversity has been restored, as has quality of the ecosystems, thus creating the conditions for a balance between local development and protection of the biosphere. The SUM also undertook social investigations to identify obstacles limiting the advance toward sustainable development. The project is characterised by broad-based social participation and is promoting techno-scientific communities by giving their members active influence in terms of implementing the innovations.

This example demonstrates that the SUM can work on various kinds of significant local innovations: hardware (equipment and products), software (information systems, management technology) and orgware (strategic public management methods). In other words, the SUM can promote social technologies (3). The SUM are involved in significant work for the promotion of local development, including: helping to think out local development strategies and the role played by knowledge in those strategies; contributing to increasing the capacities to absorb/construct/ spread knowledge and technologies; facilitating the connection of institutes in the municipality via information networks, thus allowing a flow of the knowledge necessary for local development; and identifying local arrangements and productive systems (Cassiato and Lastres, 2003), as well as the knowledge and technologies needed for their development, thus promoting a techno-scientific population.

The road to be travelled by the SUM is a long and complicated one. The majority of teachers are working part-time in the SUM and have other labour commitments; the process of training students is just beginning and teaching quality is a principal concern; the Cuban economic system to date does not always function to the benefit of local economic dynamics and the emphasis on local development is still incipient; teachers' salaries do not always meet their expectations and the resources available for the SUM are scant. However, teaching personnel with much practical experience, knowledge of the localities in which they are working and solid motivation have come together in certain sites. In many municipalities the SUM enjoys symbolic capital and thus can mobilise the support of local government and other agencies. The SUM has the support of the IES and research centres, which facilitates knowledge and technological transfer and international cooperation is playing a complementary role in some of the municipalities.

Final comments

The changes taking place in Cuban higher education are an attempt to contribute to sustainable social development based on knowledge. In this paper we have outlined the most important characteristics of the process of universalising Cuban higher education, its origins, conceptual bases and certain experiences. These indicate that the incorporation of the majority of young people into university studies offers new opportunities for a kind of social development that is attentive to social integration, justice and equity, where the training of members of society allows them, to a large extent, to act as both beneficiaries and agents of development. However, the educational model implemented is a highly innovative one and poses formidable challenges.

In conjunction with this process, the creation of university campuses in all of the country's municipalities offers greater possibilities of a positive exchange between knowledge and technologies and the social, economic, environmental and cultural needs of communities. Within the SUM, social innovations can find new ways of contributing to sustainable social development, as demonstrated in the experiences on which we have commented.

Jorge Núñez Jover is Professor at the University of Havana,
Francisco Benítez Cárdenas is Technical Specialist at the Ministry of Higher Education,
Dimas Hernández Gutiérrez is Director at the Ministry of Higher Education
and Aurora Fernández González is Deputy Minister at the Ministry of Higher Education.


Notes

(1) The Cuban process of the universalisation of higher education has been discussed in a number of academic forums; for example, the International Higher Education Congresses UNIVERSIDAD 2006 and 2008, both in Havana. In Hernández, D. et al (2006) and Núñez, J. et al 2006a, 2006b and 2007 focuses and experiences were discussed. There are various academic initiatives for studying the process, including the University Management of Knowledge and Innovation for Development Research Programme, with 74 projects, with the participation of the authors.

(2) Camajuaní is a municipality in Villa Clara province with an extensión of 614 sq.km and 64,000 inhabitants. We are grateful for the collaboration of Carlos A. Hernández Medina, SUM deputy director in Camajuaní.

(3) Social technologies have been defined as: "a conjunction of transformation techniques and methodologies developed and/or applied in interaction with the population and appropriated by it, which represent solutions in relation to social inclusion and improved living conditions." See http://www.itsbrasil.org.br


References

Cassiolato, J. E. and Lastres, H. M. M., (2003). "O Foco em arranjos produtivos e inovativos locais de micro e pequenas empresas." Cassiolato J. E., Lastres H. M. M. and Maciel M. L. (org.) Pequena empresa: cooperação e desenvolvimento local. Relume Dumará: UFRJ, Instituto de Economía, pp. 21-34, Río de Janeiro.

Castro, F., (1957). Speech given at a rally at the University of Havana at the end of an event to honour the heroes of March 13 in Política Internacional. Año 7, No. 25.

Consejo Superior de Universidades (1962): La Reforma de la Enseñanza Superior en Cuba, Colección Documentos, Havana.

De Souza Santos, B. (2006). La universidad en el siglo XXI. Para una reforma democrática y emancipadora de la universidad, Havana, Casa de las Américas.

ECLAC (2006): Social Panorama of Latin America 2006, on www.eclac.org

Hernández, D and Benítez, F (compilers) (2006): La Nueva Universidad Cubana y su contribución a la universalización del conocimiento, Editorial Félix Varela, Havana. 404 pp.

Fernández, A and Núñez, J. (1996): "Posgrado y desarrollo: la experiencia cubana", Universidades, UDUAL, No. 12, julio-diciembre, Mexico.

Núñez, J. Montalvo, L. F., Pérez, I. (2006 a) "Universidad, conocimiento y desarrollo local", Editorial Academia, Havana 2006 pp. 205-219.

Núñez, J, Montalvo, L.F, Pérez, I (2006 b): "La gestión del conocimiento, la información y la innovación tecnológica para el desarrollo local" en La Nueva Universidad Cubana y su contribución a la universalización del conocimiento, Hernández, D and Benítez, F (compilers), Editorial Félix Varela, Havana. pp. 3-20.

Núñez, J. (2007):"La pertinencia social del posgrado: ¿Cómo construirla?" en El nuevo conocimiento para la integración, Convenio Andrés Bello, No.3, Bogotá, pp.138-164.

Núñez, J., Montalvo, L. F., Pérez (2007): "Universidad y desarrollo social basado en el conocimiento: nuevas estrategias desde lo local" pp. 165-184 en Innovaciones creativas y desarrollo humano. Compilers: A. Gallina, J. Núñez, V. Capecchi y L. F. Montalvo, Ediciones Trilce, Uruguay, 2007, 319 pp.

Núñez, J., Figaredo, F. (2007): CTS en contexto: la construcción social de una tradición académica, en proceso de edición.

Núñez, J., Pérez, I (2007): La construcción de capacidades de investigación e innovación en las universidades: el caso de la Universidad de La Habana, en proceso de edición.

Putnam, R., Leonard, R y Nanneti, R. (1994): Para que la democracia funcione. Tradiciones cívicas en Italia, Caracas, Galas.

Putnam, R., Goss, K. (2002): "Introduction". Democracies in Flux. The Evolution of Social Capital in Contemporary Society, compiled by Robert D. Putnam, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press.

UNESCO (1998): World Declaration on Higher Education for the 21st Century: Vision and Action. On: www.unesco.org/es

Schtulmann, A: Commentary on Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of the American Community by Robert Putnam, Simon & Schuster 2000 en http://es. wikimedia.org. Accessed 9.05.2008.


Copyright
Copyright for this work is held jointly between the co-authors and the International Journal of Cuban Studies under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative 3.0 Licence

IJCS Volume 1 Issue 1 June 2008