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Sociocritical Study of Education in Venezuelan Cages

 

Author: Yudith Coromoto González Castro

Universidad Nacional Experimental “Rafael María Baralt”, UNERMB

yudithgonzalez@live.com

Valera, Venezuela

 

Abstract

The process of scientific reflection aims to generate theoretical contributions derived from a sociocritical study of the education of Venezuelan prisons. For this purpose, a documentary analysis was carried out, under a wide bibliographical review, through which a set of antecedents was obtained to configure the reality of the study fact. The critical social process is carried out under the orientation of the paradigmatic approach with a hermeneutical qualitative modality, in order to organize the research work. As a theoretical basis classical and contemporary theories of andragogical education were configured, as well as sociological theories that serve as the basis for the theoretical-scientific construction for the improvement of the educational practice of Venezuelan prisons.

 

Keywords: education; prisons; penal sanctions.

 

 

 

Estudio Sociocrítico de la Educación en las Cárceles Venezolanas

 

Resumen

El proceso de reflexión científica tiene como propósito generar aportes teóricos derivados de un estudio sociocrítico de la educación de las cárceles venezolanas. Para ello se realizó un análisis de tipo documental, bajo una profunda revisión bibliográfica, a través de la cual se recabó un conjunto de antecedentes para configurar la realidad del hecho de estudio. El proceso socio crítico se realizó bajo la orientación del enfoque paradigmático con una modalidad cualitativa hermenéutica, con la finalidad de organizar las labores de investigación. Como basamento teórico se configuraron teorías clásicas y contemporáneas de la educación andragógica, así como teorías sociológicas que sirven de base para la construcción teórico-científica para el mejorar la práctica educativa de las cárceles venezolanas.

 

Palabras clave: educación; prisión; sanción penal. 

 

 

 

1. Introduction

Sociocritical study is defined as an accumulation of doctrines, sketches and hypotheses that react to the opposite of the current of positivism. Such ideas establish the requirement to promote a rational and liberating independence for people. In the opinion of Fernández (2002: 18): "it is an investigative approach that promotes massive participation and self-reflection". From this study we study the reality of Venezuelan prisons in educational praxis, where the theory and practice are contrasted, based on knowledge, including the participation of the actors of analysis in the investigative process, as well as direct knowledge towards the freedom of the human being.

 

According to the UNESCO Thesaurus prison means prison, cell, prison, penitentiary, prison, where an individual meets a criminal sanction, becoming a prisoner. In this regard, the Venezuelan prisons from the orientation of the (UNESCO, 1998a), are spaces designed to accommodate people who have violated the laws of society, whose purpose is to reform those who do not respect the rules. In this establishment individuals are detained in order to punish such situation.

 

From this scenario, it becomes convenient to analyze education in Venezuelan prisons, according to the UNESCO Thesaurus, education is defined as a method of learning, teaching and training through various means: online learning, face-to-face teaching, correspondence teaching , distance education, distance training, tele training and includes various educational sciences and educational environment.

 

Education in Venezuelan prisons is manifested as a complex regime to generate significant learning and changes from the academic, social, cultural and personal point of view in those deprived of liberty. In this sense, education in these areas should not be detached from common social and political principles that are considered inalienable rights. Therefore, education must be a system with equal opportunities for all people (UNESCO, 1998b), including those deprived of their liberty, which, although they grant them recognized equality, are merely formal and contained in the legal texts in force, but it is not real to what occurs in the prison environment, given that only access to educational claimants is guaranteed, but not their permanence, prosecution, even graduation and formation of values.

 

This means that the inmate who demands the right to study will be recognized for his enrollment, but it will depend on his effort and sacrifice to achieve the objectives, learning goals and restitution of values. From this perspective, it is not about guaranteeing the conditions of permanence, but of resistance to be able to survive within the school process, where the progresses that are happening continuously in the acquisition of knowledge, experiences and superior forms of behavior obey the conditions social, that is, that possess perceptive, motor and intellectual maturity to overcome difficulties and demands of the various types of learning required to reintegrate back into society.

 

In this way, the educational success of the inmate is not conditioned only to the factors of planning or educational programming, but of personal maturation and the social factor to keep alive the driving force of the motivation to remain, to continue, to graduate and to restitute values. Since the current educational system of prisons is not basically structured to meet previous demands.

 

This translates practically into the need to insert an educational paradigm with andragogic bases, since currently the education that is taught in the venues, attacks lethally the efficiency, the academic quality that must be preserved and stimulated in the students to be able to offer scientific knowledge, technological and humanistic, to integral and autonomous development.

 

Therefore, to cover the crisis situation that prisons experience from the educational point of view, we must add the authentic intensity of changing the traditional educational structure for an andragogic education whose presence will contribute to deepen the deteriorated institutional, academic and administrative life of the education system implemented so far.

 

Finally, this article proposes to conduct a socio-critical study of education in Venezuelan prisons, in order to provide reflections that lead to improve educational practice in these areas. 

 

2. Education in Venezuelan prisons

Education is relevant in all stages of human development, but it reaches a valuable importance when its beneficiaries are referred to those deprived of liberty, since it allows them to increase their personal resources based on their reintegration into society. From this perspective, education is an essential human right to be able to train all the other rights, which has as an objective the integral development of the subject. Consequently, the access of people to education generates the creation of ties of belonging to society, that is, creates communication and recreation of culture.

 

In reference to the above, the State is in charge of guaranteeing and promoting the effective enjoyment of education and of all human rights, since in theory the incarcerated person is deprived of his ambulatory freedom, therefore, he must enjoy and respect other constitutional rights.

 

In this way, education in prisons in Latin America is submerged in a frank crisis, which every day becomes more intense and proportionate, making the possibility of being subject to an expected control that diminishes its inordinate depth deepening. (Tunnermann, 2010). In effect, the crisis of education is defined by the fact that the educational system clearly fails to give, totally or partially, satisfaction or response to the specific problems posed, especially from the point of view of the restitution of values.

 

In this line, it is conceived that the nature and character of education, as well as teaching in Venezuelan prisons, should stop being a process based on a pedagogical criterion that ignores the adult condition of the student deprived of liberty, without exaggerating, most of the teachers are fully or almost totally convinced that the student in these centers can not be subjected to a situation of authoritarianism in which the possibility of conscious, creative and critical participation is reduced to the slightest expression, in accordance with its integral formation, intellectual, emotional, social and ergological development, (Picón, 2004). Therefore, the educational system must be introduced in the light of the novel theory of andragogic education or of adults.

 

The foregoing is relevant, because the traditional education taught in prisons, in general, denies the capacities for self-realization, autonomy, self-responsibility and self-determination inherent to the adult status of the student, (Didriksson, 2010): situation that generates a state of psycho-socio-emotional regression in which he should be subject of the process, since by forcing him to submit to the rigid molds of a school structure to the rigor of pedagogism more amazing as traditional education, he ends up resigning himself to being that that he must practice an imposed behavior, acquiring a pattern to be able to think and act in decision making and assume responsibilities in social life.

 

The presence of this reality in the educational life of those deprived of liberty leads inexorably to them disrespecting their right to form themselves as integral persons and internalize the alienating spirit of submission and disrespect, which means the renunciation of being an integral man owner of his present and of his future. Therefore, it is an error not to try something to overcome, even partially, this situation governed by the principles of anti-values. Doing nothing is equivalent to maintaining one of the causes that determine the academic crisis in prisons, that of remaining ineffective and untrained in values.

 

Consequently, while those who make up the educational community of the prisons do not become aware of this unobjectionable reality, it will be impossible to assume the condition of agents of change in school renewal, for this, education programs are considerable means to renew and to improve the educational exercise and the educational organizational structure based on an andragogic education, with the purpose of improving the training capacity, reconstructing what prevails today in order to achieve to create and establish a dislocated education of the weight of tradition without fear of the future , based on the andragogic principles that will allow adapting interpersonal relationships (teacher - student, student - student, teacher - authority), learning resources, content, objectives, methodological strategies, in short the curriculum to the bio-psycho-social nature of the members of the prison student community.

 

From this point of view, the educational program of prisons must be composed of a set of subjects that provide knowledge of the ideas, theories, schools and disciplines that make up the andragogic theory and its philosophical, anthropological, psychological, sociological, political approaches. Which has to be aimed at an analytical - critical review of the various educational theories related to education in the country, but also with the personal environment of the private freedom, so that in this way a theoretical - practical plan is constituted - critical of the formation of individuals and teachers.

 

Likewise, they must provide knowledge in the first place on the theory of educational technology, covering curricular and instructional design, as well as including practical training in the techniques and methodologies of educational technology as an important part in andragogic training. Secondly, the theory and training related to the methodology of the research and its different modalities and applications must be included, this whole conforms to the technological (not technocratic) and heuristic level of the teacher's training.

 

As you can see, the andrological education tries to take into account all the components that the formation of the deprived of freedom includes so that it becomes an activity where the teaching-learning process can be qualified with a continuity and horizontal progressivity to achieve a unity didactic that integrates and involves all the participants.

 

In this way, educational programs and the andragogic updating of teachers and students recompose the condition that has been the cause of the absence of a legitimate practice of autonomy as a necessary condition for the full exercise of educational life. In fact it can be said, without sinking simplicity and ingenuity, that teachers, along with the directors and staff of the prison to assume an authoritarian attitude towards the student has been allowed not to be present the status of values ​​in adults deprived of freedom, which is nothing other than preventing him from responsibly taking on the possibility of participating rationally, creatively and critically in education and values, which has led to autonomy becoming a real fetish without full and concrete realization in the prison education.

 

This is because the nature and execution of autonomous education indisputably requires an adult social base, that is, a community of adults that, conformed around the achievement of desirable superior aims, not only of a professional-training nature but also of investigation and of solution of vital problems, stimulate the critical conscience and the creative capacity in all so that they are apt in the future performance of the educational adults.

  

In other words, not having an education with an andragogic base, will generate that students are not in a position to better perform their dynamic and creative development by not being able to promote and maintain their academic development and moral ethical values.

 

From there, it is clear the importance assumed by the current academic structural organization of the prison education system and its functioning, since it requires the adoption of the underlying praxis in the andragogic model (andragogic praxiology). Therefore, it is imperative that the teaching staff have an exercise focused on developing a rational interpretation of the nature of learning, immersed in the formation of values ​​and the role that must be fulfilled to appropriately insert students deprived of liberty to society. Therefore, certain measures must be taken with the aim of renewing and modernizing the old structures that serve as the floor and framework of education in prisons.

 

This is how education in prisons should direct its action to the training, andragogic updating of teaching staff (Marcelo, 1995); It must also equip itself with a superior capacity to focus and solve the educational problems that adult learning poses. It must also seek to establish a formation that stimulates and deepens the development of andragogic science.

 

3. Methodological Approach

The context of the research is limited to the reality of education in Venezuelan prisons from an axiological perspective of the reintegration of the inmates into society, the methodological approach was carried out from a documentary point of view, reflective criticism.

 

Delimited the context of analysis, Venezuelan prisons and their educational programs were selected as study actors, allowing to establish the accuracy of the information. The data collection was carried out through the documentary review technique and support in the primary sources such as statements, articles, analysis on the educational reality in the prisons, as well as in books, Web information, opinions of experts, among others.

 

The socio-critical analysis was conducted contrasting the documentary information, with the opinions of experts and the reality of education in prisons, generating knowledge and concrete reflections that help improve the quality of education of prisoners in Venezuela. 

 

4. Conclusions

Education in Venezuelan prisons faces a joint challenge of conjunctural, economic and social elements such as: raising the quality of educational processes, economic resources in smaller amounts than required; improve academic quality in relation to the budgetary, financial and administrative aspects. Therefore, this research was harmonized with the changing agenda of the management of Venezuelan prisons, where the incorporation of innovative tools of self-evaluation and self-regulation of educational functions is considered. It is convenient to say that the idea of ​​adult education in its various forms and levels, formal or non-formal, must always be considered so that students can develop and enrich their skills, knowledge, skills and attitudes, which it would have inestimable repercussions in the advance and educational development, by overcoming the limits imposed by the existing paroxysmal pedagogy, as well as by the surrounding social life, by participating in the processes of human assessment to promote the structural changes of society (García, 2007) .

 

 From this context, it should also be borne in mind that another of the aspects present in the crisis of prison education is the teaching staff, who have received very little training from the criterion of the andragogic principles to impart a more perceptive education to the private of freedom. It must be emphasized that teacher training must be adapted to the needs of the prison education system, since they are a necessity, since they constitute a determining factor in the educational quality that is expected.

 

Therefore, it is obvious that the effectiveness and efficiency of the formal andragogic educational work to fulfill the function of contributing to the teaching learning and restitution of the values ​​of the inmates, depends mainly on the teaching staff, as well as the adequate planning and supervision of the educational process (Corredor, 2009).

 

In another order, we must not lose sight of the fact that prisoners are, above all, subjects of rights. And the State must be the guarantor of effective compliance with its rights. Therefore, managers and staff who do active work as teachers should be involved in the reality that prisons live to avoid the violation of human rights and help private individuals to prepare themselves to face up to society as integral persons.

 

It is recognized that the majority of those held in prisons belong to the most vulnerable sectors of society. Therefore, education becomes a right that recognizes other rights, however, this reality is not true, since education has sometimes been denied or poorly taught in prison.

 

Consequently, the institutional approach to education in the context of the prison must be an invitation to reflect on why, why and how education should be strengthened as a right and not as a benefit, in order to be a reflection that contributes to the design of an appropriate public policy that makes the educational process a social space that professionally and personally trains those deprived of liberty.

 

Finally, the findings of this study contribute to the interpretation and understanding of education in prisons, as a contribution to generate an effective and solid educational system that allows integrating people integrity to society.

 

4. References

Corredor, J. (2009). Las metas de la educación. Una propuesta de transformación consejo de desarrollo científico y humanístico. Caracas; Venezuela: Universidad Central de Venezuela.

 

Didriksson, A. (2010). La educación y la innovación. Caracas, Venezuela: Ediciones IESALC/UNESCO.

 

Fernández, A. (2002). Filosofía, investigación, innovación y buenas prácticas. México: Editorial UNAM.

 

García, G. (2007). Conocimiento, educación y sociedad en América Latina. Caracas, Venezuela: Cendes/Editorial Nueva Sociedad.

 

Marcelo, C. (1995). La formación del profesorado para el cambio educativo. Barcelona, España: EUB.

 

Picón, G. (2004). El proceso de convertirse en educador. Ediciones de la Caracas, Venezuela: Universidad Pedagógica Experimental Libertad.

 

Tunnermann, B. (2010). La educación en América latina. Bogotá, Colombia: En Universitas.

 

Tesauro de la UNESCO (1977). Información de vocablos. UNESCO. Recuperado de: http://vocabularies.unesco.org/browser/thesaurus/es/

 

UNESCO. (1998a,b). Declaración mundial sobre la educación en el siglo XXI. Visión y Acción y Marco de Acción Prioritaria para el Cambio y el Desarrollo de la Educación superior. París, Francia: Conferencia Mundial sobre la Educación Superior. Recuperado de: http://www.unesco.org/education/educprog/wche/declaration_spa.htm

 

 

Yudith Coromoto González Castro

e-mail: yudithgonzalez@live.com