Venezuela’s new educational reform law, passed by the National Assembly yesterday and signed today, August 15, 2009, will require, among other measures, that schools educate students in critical thinking, and specifically that they be educated to critically analyze the content of information provided by the media. (Projecto de Ley Orgánica De Education, Chapter 1, Article 9,”Educación y Responsabilidad Social de los Medios de Comunicación - Education and Social Responsibility in the Communication Media). The proposed law was published in full in Panorama/, a Spanish language newspaper from Maracaibo, Zulia state, Ve. August 9, 2009.
Why is Education in Critical Thinking Needed, Not Only in Venezuela, But in the United States?
These Republican-owned media make sure that information they distribute favors their politics and their profit interests. Concentration of ownership into a few corporate owners has drastically suppressed factual, objective reporting and turned our media into info-tainment with a pervasive, barely cloaked, right wing bias.
In the United States, approximately six huge Republican corporations own 90 per cent of our news and commentary. This makes it very easy for these big companies to control the content of all the information we receive through their media.
A prime recent example is the vast publicity provided for the relatively small group of anti-health reform protestors. We have seen a myriad of TV and cable news shows repeating footage of loud, frequently abusive and racist, verbal attacks on Democratic congressional representatives in their summer break “town hall” meetings. That same media provides little coverage of those who actively support health reform or the stories of those injured by lack of access to affordable health care.
The conclusion the big Republican media moguls want us to draw is that Obama, his health care reform and all his other programs, are massively unpopular with the majority of citizens. They prefer to ignore the fact that Obama’s popular support is in the mid-sixty percentages and 73 percent of Americans want health reform.
The extensive coverage of the vocal, anti-Obama, health reform opponents has revealed that many of the protestors are stunningly ignorant of basic facts about our current health care reality. Thus we have seen protestors loudly attacking reform proposals as “government control of our health”, while at the same time demanding “hands off our Medicare”, ignoring the fact that our Medicare system is government controlled and is, in fact, a highly successful example of the very “government control of health care” they are attacking in their anti-health reform protests.
So too, those protestors who are screaming that Obama seeks to set up “death panels” to determine life and death issues for health care recipients, fail to realize that there are no such “death panels” in any of the proposed reforms. The anti-health care reformers also falsely regard a proposal, first initiated by a conservative Georgia Republican, for voluntary end-of-life decision counseling, as forcing patients to forego life-sustaining health care measures. Funds for end-of-life planning allow patients who choose to talk with their doctors about treatment alternatives and end-of-life decision-making, to do so without paying extra for their consultations.
Many protestors are ignorant of the facts and, perhaps more importantly, ignorant of the real sources of their misinformation -- the media. They may be equally ignorant that their protests are being organized, by private insurer-funded astro-turfing organizations who are using their misdirected anger to provide a protective “grass roots” coloration for corporate policy strategies.
Such organizations freely use false information to inflame their manufactured “grass roots” supporters.
In Venezuela, like the U.S., some 90 per cent of Venezuelan media is owned by private corporations, many of whom have actively supported efforts to depose President Chavez and who are still working tirelessly, with U.S. financial support, to defeat his programs.
As with the U.S. media’s distortions of the facts concerning proposed health reform policies, the Venezuelan media has a long history of factual distortion to secure public support for their own political ends. Prior to the last referendum on amending the Constitution to abolish term limits, the Venezuelan media widely proclaimed that the measure would make President Chavez “President for Life”, ignoring the fact that it simply allowed re-election of a president if the majority voted to do so. The majority of voters saw through their distortion and passed the amendment abolishing term limits.
The Venezuelan media is now engaged in a concerted campaign to convince voters that measures in the government’s new educational reform legislation here will send children into government indoctrination camps where they will be brainwashed against their parents and their church.
Many news sources in Venezuela carry claims that the Chavez government plans to take children away from their parents and to take away the family’s home and private property. The fact is that there are no plans whatever to take children from their parents and there is an extensive government program to assist families in buying their own homes!
As in the U.S., the reason that most of the media in Venezuela publishes inaccurate articles against the Chavez government is because the Chavez government is seeking to end control of the country and its economy by the wealthiest one percent of the population, and to end the vast disparity in wealth between that one percent and the majority of Venezuelan citizens. The owners of the media here are part of that top one percent.
Indeed, the Chavez government has successfully reduced poverty by 22% since coming to power in 1998, and has repeatedly increased the minimum wage while providing needed services in free health care and education, while subsidizing housing, and basic food stuffs for the majority of citizens. At the same time, they have nationalized critical industries to stabilize production, control prices, and direct profits to benefit the whole population. As a result, Chavez enjoys support and popularity here such that he and his party won 14 of the past 15 elections since 1998 by large margins. The one referendum he lost was lost by less than 1%. His popular support polled this month at 63%.
Thus, given so much distortion of facts in its media, the Chavez government proposes to teach its citizens to think critically about the information they receive.
Chavez considers education to be the sine qua non of participatory democracy and has massive free educational programs in place to teach reading and writing at the basic level and to expand the free university and technical education systems so that everyone has access to higher learning, a major feature of the new educational law. One of his labor proposals – to reduce the working day to six hours – is motivated, in part, by the goal of allowing more people to have the time to access educational programs for themselves and to participate more actively in the education of their children. Chavez seeks to educate critically thinking citizens, something Venezuelan media apparently deplores, as they are outraged about this new legislation.
News consumers in the U.S. are inundated by negative slurs against the socialist Chavez government because the big corporations owning our media and now controlling much of our government, have enormous fear that the ideas behind the Chavez brand of government might be imported into the U.S.
The very last thing Republican corporations want is to expose our citizens to the idea that a government should “provide for the general welfare” of its citizens, as is stated in the preamble to our Constitution, rather than provide for the private profits of its corporations, as is the present reality.
In sum, the U.S. should follow Venezuela’s lead and provide “critical thinking” courses for all our citizens to help restore our democracy. We can start by re-establishing basic civics courses in our elementary and high school curriculums. Polls show that many of us do not even understand our tri-partite division of government among Congress, the executive and our judiciary, much less that our founding fathers saw an independent press as a necessary fourth branch, needed to supply accurate information and encourage critical thinking about our society and its functioning.
We cannot make intelligent, democratic decisions on important issues such as health care without access to accurate, factual information. The media’s coverage of our health reform efforts demonstrates that our media are not providing the needed accurate, factual information. The first step in correcting the misinformation problem is encouraging critical thinking in all our citizens. Chavez’s Venezuela is taking affirmative steps to do that. We need to do the same.