Cultural Revitalization and Educational Change in Cuba

Abstract: THE NEED TO DEVELOP more powerful theories to illuminate relationships between social development and educational change has recently received growing recognition. This call for "theory building," for the creation of logico-deductive explanatory systems which could serve to generate empirically verifiable propositions about critical knowledge needs is, I believe, a hopeful sign of maturation in the field of educational studies.' Theory-building has, of course, long been the central concern of social scientists in their efforts to produce knowledge about human behavior and change in social systems. It is a major contention of this paper that educators seeking to better understand the inter-relationships between any nation's educational complex of formal, non-formal, and informal educational subsectors to other developmental sectors will be well advised to look to existing theory in the social disciplines. Clearly, one need is to order, to synthesize the large number of existing assumptions, propositions, and hypotheses in the literature with the intent of constructing middle-range theories to guide further research and attempts at innovation and renewal within educational systems. Educational-change theories must be built not only retroductively working from the data to an explanatory framework, but also through the testing and reformulation of existing theoretical constructs.2 It is here, perhaps, in the testing and adaptation of existing social-science theory that the comparative educator has the best possibilities to make significant contributions to the basic task of science, to our understanding of how classes of systems work. This paper will concentrate on this second imperative, that comparative educators become more knowledgeable consumers of, and contributors to, theory in the social sciences. My objective will be, using the extreme case of Cuba, to explain how the process of rapid and thorough-going educational change is intricately bound up in the process of radical social reconstruction. The analysis draws heavily on the corpus of revitalization theory elaborated in large part by the social anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace. Although this theory offers an essentially anthropological or cultural explanation of the inter-connections between educational and social change, it is, nevertheless, as I will attempt to