The universalization of higher education in Venezuela

As an emancipatory process of Bolivarianism expressed through the mission

sucre Guarenas – municipality square
Author: MSC. Mary Teresa Herrera
Institution: Sucre Mission
Position: teacher facilitator
Email: tmayte@gmail.com

Summary:
With the development of this research work, it became evident that the Sucre Mission is
part of a paradigm shift in Venezuelan University Education. It is the promotion of higher
education for inclusion, making possible university coexistence spaces where the
universalization of higher education takes place.
This is the Municipalization of Higher Education through the University Villages
and their respective academic environments of systematization that take place in the
different Municipalities according to federal entities, where it is carried out through a
process of emancipation of Bolivarian education. This approach makes the traditional
concepts of higher education more flexible and incorporates a more humanizing
conception of education, promoting a change in students as individual subjects and
builders of social change through their professional training.

Keywords : Universalization of Higher Education in Venezuela, process

Emancipator of Bolivarianism, Municipalization of Higher Education, Sucre Mission.

Introduction:

In Venezuela, as a result of the exemplary anti-imperialist stance of the President of the

Republic Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, the need for the construction of Bolivarian
Socialism in the country has been raised. The revolution of the Venezuelan government
and people is directed at the economic, political, social and cultural-educational level,
being important to transcend capitalism and favor the consolidation of the new
democratic and social State of law and justice. From this perspective, the educational
field has been the spearhead in terms of social inclusion policy.
The philosophical and ideological conception of Venezuelan Bolivarian
education is based on an increasingly humanizing education, based on a human
continuum, based on a clear vision of the ethical and moral values that are required for
the transformation of society today. Bolivarian education in accordance with the
historical moment that the population is experiencing is limited to the constitutional
conception of the Teaching State. The Teaching State must guarantee in the

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educational process the human essence, ethics, quality education for all, free and
mandatory, as an inalienable right of every citizen.
These conditions of the Teaching State are necessary in Venezuela since the
new republican man and woman required in our society must be prepared to face the
challenges and social historical demands, influenced and determined by today's
globalized world. In this sense, the Venezuelan Bolivarian revolutionary process is
being developed and takes place parallel to an international context, where antagonistic
forces meet in the "Great Global Village." We speak of globalization, characterized by
international relations biased by neoliberalism which has generated in non-industrialized
countries perverse consequences in the name of the supposed “economic growth”, as
well as, “balance of prices and production” of the nations that are part of it.
In this sense, the Venezuelan revolution faces a neoliberalized globalizing
process whose direct consequences will aim to perpetuate the precariousness of
human capital manifest in culture, knowledge, health, in all areas of Venezuelan social
life, especially in the most vulnerable sectors. vulnerable in society.
Consequently, in the face of the vicissitudes of the capitalist model, the
Bolivarian revolution takes the reins of the social life of the country, setting out as its
goal the collective construction of the Great Homeland of Bolívar with a model of social
economic development based on humanity, participation, protagonism and co-
responsibility of citizens.
The universalization of university education in Venezuela in this research work
refers as an emancipatory process of Bolivarianism expressed through the Sucre
Mission with the experience of the municipalization of Higher Education through the
University Villages. Since September 2003, Venezuela has experienced a change in
university education, which promotes the recovery of the concept of training from being ,
of itself as nature - matter and as the future that installs the world on the horizon in
order to displace the past. and assume the historical-political present, transforming the
reality that denies their human condition and the deterioration of relationships with
nature, with their urban environment. Training arises from endogenous development,
from the conditions of human beings and the communities formed by them. In this way,
we respond to National Policies and the need for more humane professionals
committed to their environment.
The purpose of this research work is to present the curricular unit “Orientation
and Accreditation” belonging to the first trajectory of the technical careers of the Sucre
Mission. Where the essence of said course is the development of a student's life project
parallel to the country's national project. In this way, we work with a consolidated
education model, which is developed and built from the student's own practice where
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the commitment of this new professional who is being trained transcends individual
training, he must assume said training to benefit his community, therefore human,
academic, intellectual, and sociopolitical training is developed for an immediate praxis of
commitment to their closest environment, their community .

Bolivarianism:

Bolivarianism is a current of political thought theoretically based on the life and work of
Simón Bolívar. Dario Azzellini states in his article The Bolivarian Revolution, that the
fundamental idea of Bolivarianism is based on the different experiences of local,
regional, national and continental emancipatory struggles and the history of resistance
itself. In this sense, the Bolivarian revolution bases its philosophical bases on the tree of
the three roots. Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, maximum leader of our revolution and
current president of Venezuela, affirms in EL Libro Azul that this project has been
reborn from the rubble and is rising now, at the end of the 20th century, supported by a
theoretical-political model that condenses the decisive conceptual elements of the
thought of those three illustrious Venezuelans... the Tree of the Three Roots: Ezequiel
Zamora, Bolívar and Robinson. Such a project, always defeated until now, has a
pending encounter with victory. We are simply going to provoke this inevitable
encounter (p12). The tree with the three roots represents a symbol of the values of
Bolivarianism and its foundations. Simón Rodríguez (1769-1854), philosopher and
teacher of Simón Bolívar represents the search for its own forms of social and political
organization and the importance of training -Spanish America is Original; Its institutions
and its government must be original: And its means of founding both must be original.
Either We Invent or We Err - Simón Bolívar (1783-1830) in turn represents the
importance of independence and sovereignty, as well as the fight to achieve them. And
the peasant general of the federal war, Ezequiel Zamora (1817-1860), represents the
importance of the fight for a more just and democratic society, which continued after
independence. Zamora led several peasant uprisings under the slogans: “free lands
and men”; “popular election” and “horror of the oligarchy.”

The Universalization of Higher Education as an Emancipatory process from

Bolivarinism through University Municipalization:

Universalization implies the opening of the opportunities available to all those people,
without any type of discrimination, who wish to join university training and acquire their
profession. A generalization is proposed at the level of higher education that guarantees

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the personal realization of the being , the human entity and the social-political
consolidation of the Nation project proposed in the Constitution of the Bolivarian
Republic of Venezuela.
Universalization is an alternative to higher education that has been maintained
for years and responds to a conservative and dependent policy that defends the
interests of an economic minority, strengthening class differences and cultural denial.
The broad inclusion of citizens overcomes the exclusive particularities for certain social
groups, which had conventionally been systematized, through the use of exclusive
admission methods in Venezuelan public universities, that is, financed with monetary
resources from the State.
Since 1999, our country has experienced a structural change in all components,
in order to transform and consolidate a new Venezuela through participatory and
leading democracy. Education, as a fundamental component, receives special
treatment, which allows it to displace conventional education, in most cases, purely
theoretical and isolated from the realities and problems of our society.
In the Conceptual Foundations of the Sucre Mission (2003) it is stated that…”
The Sucre Mission has been designed as a strategy to break, through Higher
Education, the circles of exclusion and consists of incorporating everyone into Higher
Education. high school graduates who wish to do so... It is about generating the active
and leading incorporation of all the sectors involved regardless of their age, with a
positive vision of education that is recognized as a form of participation in knowledge,
as a form of personal growth and of social evolution, which implies the transfer of power
to citizens in real terms not exclusively from a perspective of professionalization.”
The new education promotes the recovery of the concept of formation from the
being, of itself as nature - matter and as becoming. It is the recognition of education as
transformative training (Osorio, B. 2005: 11), which responds to a political vision
centered on the being, its human rights, social justice, horizontal relations of power and
democratic participation, which implies economic liberation, the recovery of autonomy
and non-dependence on other dominant countries.
Ethics is reaffirmed in the community sense, in the elimination of poverty, of
those excluded from education. Training arises from endogenous development, from
the human being's own conditions, at a particular level and from the communities
formed by them at a social level.
It refers to an open and comprehensive training, where theory and praxis go
hand in hand, through learning - by doing, to promote comprehensive community
development: environmental, economic, social, cultural, technical-scientific and political.
In this way, we respond to National Policies, to the need for more humane
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professionals, committed to their social environment. It responds to the new world
philosophical conceptions that have been developing over time, displacing what was
and that are put into practice in Venezuela today. It proposes going to the thing itself, to
the being of the human entity and the being of the communities made up of men and
women, to recover trust and recognize their own historical reality, as well as the
capacity of creative beings to transform the world. The universalization of Higher
Education has the Sucre Mission. Universalization covers all areas of the Nation's
territory through the Municipalization of higher education and the consolidation in the
University Villages through the Municipalization of higher education. In this sense, the
emergence of the Sucre Mission occurs as indicated in its Conceptual Foundations
(2003) that… “The Sucre Mission has been designed as a strategy to break, through
Higher Education, the circles of exclusion and consists of incorporating all high school
graduates who wish to do so into Higher Education… It is about generating the active
and leading incorporation of all the sectors involved regardless of their age, with a
positive vision of education that is recognized as a form of participation in knowledge,
as a form of personal growth and social evolution, which implies transfer of power to
citizens in real terms not exclusively from a professionalization perspective.”
The study contents of the different training programs are considered and
interrelated with the reality and problems of the region, the locality, at a more concrete
level, incorporating the contents referring to the culture of the residents, the location of
the available environmental and productive contexts, needs and manifest dispositions.
Says Mavarez M. (2005), participant in the compilation of “The municipalization
of Higher Education” that the educational model adopted has as its fundamental
objective to assume the challenges of endogenous development with a sense of social
justice and consolidation of participatory democracy… “To achieve this, a committed
student is urgently needed. with the country, with the desire to fulfill a valuable social
function… we also need teachers to guide, orient and accompany, to be sensitive to
social problems.” It is in the Municipalization where open, integrated and decentralized
higher education is consolidated, outside the classrooms or in combination with the
community context, combining theory with practice. It is an alternative that is displacing
the pedagogy of oppression, notably discussed by Pablo Freire (1970) and assuming
the pedagogy of liberation, which Freire (1977) initially promulgated in his book
Education as a practice of freedom . It is important to highlight that Popular Education
as a movement was born in Latin America in the sixties, whose precursor was Pablo
Freire with “Liberating Education”. The author says that in the face of a “banking,
uncritical, domesticating education, education for repetition and submission, there must
be a problematizing or conscientizing educational practice that makes the student
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overcome the domination he suffers and be subject to the construction of his own
history". A pedagogy that Pablo Freire (1992) also refers to in his work Pedagogy of
Hope.
The change of society is not independent of education. It is precisely a
commitment of education to change society, due to its historical condition and even
more so if it denies the condition of the human being with the presence of poverty and a
population that lacks Education. The passage from an old society to a new society
implies in turn going from “naïve transition” consciousness to “critical transitive”
consciousness. Without education there is no social change.
Educating and social change go hand in hand. Education is necessary to
change society, educate for social change. (Torres, M and others). (1994) Andragogical
Praxis. Mérida: University of Los Andes).
Consequently, the university, through Municipalization, has as its fundamental
objective to achieve the integral development of each human being and consequently of
each community that is made up of human beings. Integral development contains all the
constituent aspects of being . The cognitive aspect (thinking), affective (being), social –
political ethical (sharing) and the physical motor aspect of carrying out productive work
(doing). That is what is happening in our country in every corner of the Municipalities
where the Municipalization of Higher Education is operating.
The student's life project in the Sucre Mission and his personal - professional
transformation.
The curricular unit titled “Orientation and Accreditation” is developed in the first
university career of students in technical careers. The fundamental pillar of unity is the
student's life project.
The life project consists of the possibility of beginning to build today what one
aspires to live tomorrow. To reach the development of this life project, the student will
progressively have developed activities related to personal development and political-
economic ideological training.
The fundamental meanings of this curricular unit are associated with:
1 .- The development and strengthening of capacities and attitudes that favor student
performance characterized by commitment, appreciation of information, co-
responsibility and solidarity.
2 .- The identification of experiences and knowledge that can be accredited as part of
the training programs.
3 .- The promotion of the social connection of educational practices, from the
perspective of social and productive insertion.
These meanings mainly imply on the part of the student a) the understanding of
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university education as support for the development of the person, the nation and the
planet; b) recognition of one's own capabilities, experiences, knowledge and cultural
heritage, as a basis from which the student outlines his or her expectations and
participates in the training processes from his or her own perspective; c) the
assessment of the political, economic and social context, as elements from which
personal aspirations are realized, based on collective projects; d) the generation of a
dialogic environment of acceptance and respect for diversity. (Mission Sucre, 2004.
“Orientation and Accreditation Workshop”),
The construction of the student's life project will integrate the person, their family
and their community. To do this, at first the students begin by developing an activity
called “life line”, the purpose is for the students to identify significant episodes in their
lives and place them as favorable or unfavorable experiences that have marked a
before and after in life. . With this information they must graph their life line based on a
legend with their corresponding dates and close with a future goal. The next activity
they carry out is the preparation of the autobiography of each student, through which
they must place themselves as the center of their own training process, rescuing
through a process of introspection, reflection and systematization, the assets of their
life. itself, by the experiences lived (strengths, opportunities, weaknesses, threats). With
the autobiography, the participant must recognize the value of subjectivity as a source
of knowledge that will serve the development of his or her life project, which must
balance, redound, with his or her university education and professional praxis in the
project of the Venezuelan country. The student is called to review and resize his life
based on what he has experienced, to accept himself as he is and to project himself as
that professional that Venezuela socially requires, internalizing his leading role and the
importance of his participation as a social actor committed to this process of change
and transformation that our country is experiencing. Another aspect to develop in the
construction of the process represents the accreditation of the learning acquired
previously and that is relevant to your profession. Here the participant makes an
inventory of the learning, abilities, knowledge in certain areas of knowledge as well as
experiences in the workplace that are also related to certain areas of knowledge of their
professional life, with the purpose of validating and valuing said learning and
experiences acquired by him formally and/or informally.
In addition to the previous activities, the student reflects on outstanding sources
on the topic “national social economic development policy and endogenous
development”, “the profile of the professional of the technical careers of the Sucre
mission and the formation of associative spaces”.
The methodology used allows the student to be able to define a life project at the
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end of the curricular unit through a series of organized activities that are planned,
carried out and evaluated to satisfy a need, solve a problem. The comprehensive nature
of education can be evidenced through the realization of the student's life project,
strengthening the students' intellectual abilities, cognitive skills, the ability to relate to
the community and to participate in the comprehensive development of the country.
through community work from the beginning of their university life, with the commitment
to train to benefit a group.
Research Methods

• Theorists

Analysis and synthesis: it is used to systematize all the theoretical information related to
the topic under study that serves as the basis for the investigative work.

Induction-deduction: it will be used as a theoretical method to arrive at partial

conclusions and to reach the general conclusions of the investigation, as well as, within
the investigative process, to arrive at the general, starting from particular behaviors and
cases.

• Empirical

Observation: it was used to observe the behavior of the process of universalization of

higher education in Venezuela through municipalization.

Conclusions

The Venezuelan revolutionary process lays its foundations on Bolivarianism as an

emancipatory process. Its philosophical and political support is given by the tree of the
three roots with the ideas of “the illustrious Venezuelans” Simón Bolívar, Simón
Rodríguez and Ezequiel Zamora.
The universalization of higher education in Venezuela as an emancipatory
process of Bolivarianism expressed through the Sucre Mission, has implied a paradigm
shift in university education.
The Sucre Mission is based on a university education that allows its
universalization through the Municipalization of Higher Education with the University
Villages and their respective environments. In this novel experience in Venezuela, the
university space is assumed as a humanizing space, thus the relationship between it

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and society is direct since the training includes the human, the academic-intellectual
and the socio-political, with the aim that the student transform and in turn be a promoter
of the changes that your community requires, from a process of inquiry, self-reflection
and systematization of your educational praxis.

The Sucre Mission assumes the comprehensive training of the student,

therefore this training transcends the academic-individual, it is about responding to a
process of change and transformation that the country is experiencing, which is based
on university student inclusion, from assuming the paradigm of “quality education for
all.” The student's training links him to a collective self-managed process, in such a way
that the social commitment to the communities forms the day-to-day life of said process.
The Sucre Mission is based on the ideology of popular education, its main
objective is “to respond to this gigantic social debt in university education.”
In the introduction of the Guide for Participants and Teachers and Advisors of
the Orientation and Accreditation Curricular Unit, the Mission assumes the theoretical
position with Pablo Freire's Education for Liberation, returning from this “that there is no
education of liberation without social transformation.”
The life project of the student of the Sucre mission consists of the possibility of
beginning to build today what one aspires to live tomorrow. For the construction of said
project, the student constructively goes through comprehensive training that includes
the completion of the autobiography as a starting point in the student's life project and
the accreditation of learning either through studies carried out formally or through work
experience. end with the courses that are part of the study curriculum of each degree.
Thus, based on the narrative reconstruction written about their life, the participant has
the possibility of tracing and defining their professional life.
The process of student introspection initiated with the autobiography is
complemented by the andragogical model of accreditation of learning, abilities,
knowledge, knowledge and experiences that they have in certain areas according to the
career in which they are studying. Also of vital importance in their comprehensive
training is that referred to the ideological, political, economic, social and professional
training of the student.
The construction of the student's life project in the Sucre mission makes
traditional concepts of higher education more flexible and incorporates a more
humanizing conception of education, promoting a change in participants as individual
subjects and builders of social change through their professional training.

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