Cuba begins new school year with new challenges and endeavors

The new school term begins in Cuba on Monday, at a particularly complex time due to the difficult economic situation the island is going through.  According to educational authorities, this situation is caused by the intensification of the economic, commercial and financial blockade by the United States, and in the midst of the confrontation with the strategies of ideological subversion against the Revolution.

According to the Ministry of Education, the country does not renounce, however, to the purpose of providing an educational teaching process with superior quality, and is committed to the implementation of the changes foreseen in the III Educational Improvement.

In this context, this course must be characterized by a permanent evaluation of the priorities established to make it sustainable throughout the year, said recently the head of the sector, Naima Trujillo.

She also highlighted the importance of education as a pillar for the advancement of the nation, the formation of an integral, humanistic general culture, and a model of a person distinguished by knowledge and values, and not by the possession of goods.

Trujillo affirmed that teacher coverage will be guaranteed with well-defined territorial strategies that include the incorporation of students in the last year of the pedagogical universities, and other initiatives.

He pointed out that the main challenges in this regard are associated with ensuring that teachers have a permanent evaluation and that all classrooms maintain the necessary attention.

Regarding the guarantee of literature and teaching material for the new school year, he informed that it starts with an adjusted standard of notebooks and it has not been possible to produce all the titles of notebooks used so far in the educational system.

In view of this situation, those texts that methodologically involve more in the development of skills were selected, he said, and gave an example in the case of first grade with the writing notebook, which is much more demanding for the student than the mathematics one.

This 2023-2024 educational course will also have the particularity that its calendar will include two calls for entrance exams to Higher Education.