Last night a new law was approved. It was approved near midnight to be exact, when everyone was sleeping or partying or doing anything else but paying attention to the boring develop of the events inside the red- homogenous- Chavez prayers – joke… I mean, inside the National Assembly. The law was on education and it was approved just when the schools are empty because of summer vacations. And once you read the text, it seems to be more a law made to punish (the media, the private donors, the university authorities) than to educate anyone. But I have seen that some people take words like “education” and “punishment” as synonyms. I have also seen that “punishment” is a word that hides more often than not under request of a “better education”, a more “moral” education, a “right” education”. I used to think on education as not only one guide, not only one idea, and especially not a single one punishment.
Education never seemed to me as a singular word but yet as plural noun filled with different guides, ideas, thoughts, discussions, and knowledge, knowledge and even more knowledge. But I guess the Revolution will make me get used to see the Education as a singular noun, as a proper noun signed with a brand. As one single guide, so pena of a punishment, marked under their brand, or under his brand to be exact.
After all, a woman named Jaqueline Farias, which is one of those characters of the public administration one wish to never see, established a few days ago that the new law will allow us to form the “Chavez” of the future. Imagine those “Chavez” of the future… Imagine those Venezuelans who will mistake “education” for “punishment”, and “democracy” for many other things.
Nevertheless in the streets, or at least here, where I’m typing, people seem to keep dreaming on another type of education that the one it has been recently imposed to all of us: I can hear a constant “cacerolazo” and it is strange how that sound of metal –made kitchen tools and horns gives me hope of a day were the meaning of things, the synonyms and antonyms do not longer depends on one man criteria but on the concert of something yet more universal: our rights and our language.
PS: The picture corresponds to the Bolivarian University of Venezuela. The story, thoughts, and feelings about that university, created by the president, surely deserve another post but I can’t promise you anything.