Chapter 11: Education And Twenty-First Century Socialism: The Venezuelan Alternative To Neo-Liberal Capitalism

We can make a distinction between schooling, on the one hand, and education on the other, with the former referring to the processes by which young people are attuned to the requirements of capitalism both in the form and the content of schooling, and the latter, a more liberatory process from birth to death, a process of human emancipation and socialism. In many ways, the whole Bolivarian project of twenty-first century socialism is in its very essence education in that sense of the word. As we shall see, the revolutionary president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has described the country as “a giant school.”¹