Textbooks here and there
I want to ask you a favour: send me a picture of a primary or secondary school book from your country if you or rather your children or grandchildren happen to have one. Any textbook would do: maths, English (or Norwegian, German, Spanish), geography, biology...anything.
Whether you have a picture or not: tell us how much you had to pay for textbooks in primary or secondary school in your country or whether those textbooks are from the state. As far as I have found out pupils in the vast majority of developed nations and in many others use textbooks from the school at primary school level and in most countries (including very capitalist USA) they also use school books right up to secondary school.
Do you know how things are in Venezuela? The norm is that parents have to pay for books and those books can cost more than one worker's monthly salary. Sometimes they can make photocopies of the books and sometimes - the exception - they can borrow them from the very poor libraries. Misiones do provide for some very rudimentary material. Almost all Venezuelans think that is normal and anything else is "a luxury" and that "you cannot give it all away". But they think the petrol prices they have are fine and public universities are really free. No wonder most students there come from private schools in spite of all the quotas.
Venezuelans' priorities
And meanwhile Hugo Chávez has lots of money to spend in Russian tanks and Chinese airplanes and yesterday he used Bolívar's sword to take oath to 35000 militia men and women, mostly functional illiterate, as if he were a new King Arthur with his new red knights.
A suggestion to opposition "leaders": it is fine you say you are for private property and keep repeating the words "private proverty" every minute or so, but please, get into these other topics. Now.