Maps in Extinction: What Is Being Taught in Cuba’s Schools
and those around the World?
HAVANA TIMES – With GPS and Google Maps, no one seems to need paper maps anymore. Instead of books and other long reads, there are TikTok reels and social media threads.
GPS works thanks to Astronomy, the letters in tweets were invented by the Phoenicians, and maps were once used to find hidden treasures.
The widespread technologies we use and the social processes we experience operate with keys that, if we stop understanding their scientific and historical bases, will inevitably become secret codes. In other words, we will live in a magical world. I don’t use “magical” as a cute metaphor, like pink unicorns. The magicians will be the ones in control. Or maybe they already are.
After all, you ask anyone about the source of the Sun’s energy, and they don’t know—but they surely know their astrological sign.
The Decline of Scientific Content
The trend of eroding educational content in schools became evident to me in high school when, in my year, the subject of Astronomy was permanently removed. That hurt, and I didn’t understand why: I wanted to learn about planets, galaxies, supernovas, and such. And look through a telescope, because maybe I would never get the chance again.
Some will say: “Not everyone can be a cosmonaut! What’s the point of Astronomy?” I’m not going to fall into ridiculous arguments about utility. I learned empirically about the Moon’s movements by walking around my neighborhood during the Pandemic, and Astronomy was part of general education millennia before Cosmonautics even existed. Looking at the sky is communing with the Cosmos and knowing it is like belonging to a nobility—free of charge.
Recently, a private tutor in the neighborhood told me that today, Cuban high schools no longer teach the basics of semiconductor physics or differential and integral calculus (subjects I did take): pillars of digital technologies we use more and more but understand less and less.
It may be surprising that in the autobiographical novels of some 19th-century Russian writers, one reads that their high school Math was almost identical to mine (derivatives, integrals…). It’s amazing that in 150 years “with all the progress made,” it remained the same. But today, not even that. I understand teachers’ and students’ objections: “Prof, why teach that if we’ll never use it?” In today’s Cuba, it’s more useful to know how to arrange travel, get foreign currency, persuade police officers, and dance reggaeton.
True. But I wish going through those subjects could be a key experience, not a torment. It’s not about accumulating knowledge in the brain like a bank; it’s about living it, so that experience helps us understand the world we live in. Like when we read a good book that impresses us: we live the experience, even if we don’t memorize it or never return to it in our lives. And generally, it’s others who give us some reading guide, which we internalize—or not. Never thought control, but rather a map to freedom. We will have to learn to teach that way.
Ideological Indoctrination Instead of Historical Knowledge
Some time ago, I had the opportunity to talk to a History teacher at a school in London about how they taught that subject to their students. Then I learned that:
- In general education in the UK, they don’t teach World History, only some preconfigured fragments, and each school chooses which ones to cover;
- The USA (which in the UK they call “America”) is taught as the winner of World War II;
- Indoctrination exists not only in countries like Cuba.
What surprised me most was that a post-imperial, developed state, so famous for its educational quality, would so severely limit the historical content taught.
World History, by the way, is not the strong point of Cuban education either, which bombards students with repetitions of national History and doctrinal subjects (impossible to understand without global context, but they couldn’t care less), from Primary School to University. My transcript for a university degree in Sciences begins with Marxist-Leninist Philosophy and ends with Military Training (subjects common to all majors back then). As if I had been indoctrinated in some Maoist guerrilla camp.
Today, debates about educational content and methods are on the agenda in many countries, but the Cuban Ministry of Education has been unwilling to listen to critical educators.
Cuba is not so special in the world in some things. Here, too, there are voices in favor of incorporating so-called “soft skills” into education: emotional intelligence, meditation, personal finance, etc. “We all need them, but not everyone will be a scientist, engineer, or historian.” I’m not against “soft skills,” but the one-instead-of-the-other approach seems distorted to me.
Meanwhile, according to scientific reports, IQ (a psychological indicator that supposedly measures human intelligence) is declining worldwide.