Under the slogan “Post-pandemic education sector challenges”, a virtual ministerial meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac) was held on educational matters this Friday.
During the meeting, Aristóbulo Istúriz, People’s Power Minister for Education and Sector Vice-president of Social and Territorial Development of Venezuela, accompanied by the People’s Power Minister for University Education, César Trompiz, contextualized the impact of the economic war and the United States sanctions against the Latin American country in the midst of the global contingency by COVID-19.
Likewise, he detailed the modality applied by the Bolivarian Government to assume distance education.
“We started with distance education because we had no alternative, the president declared quarantine as the only mechanism to stop the spread of the virus and we appealed to all the pedagogical strategies for distance education (…) We unified all communication platforms: radio, tv, telephony, social networks, and we started working from schools, from the ministry and from all corners of the country”.
The Sector Vice-president also commented that in order to evaluate and learn from the experiences of other countries, a virtual distance education seminar was held with 15 international experts, the first one was to see the psychosocial-socioemotional impact of the quarantine on other children, and the second on educational television.
During the meeting, the People’s Power Minister for University Education of Venezuela, César Trompiz, explained the goals that Venezuela has achieved in educational matters –in the midst of COVID-19- and how through the decree of collective and voluntary quarantine of President Nicolás Maduro it was able to prevent the spread of the virus in academic settings.
During his speech, Minister Trompiz highlighted five points of interest of the Venezuelan State, and other members of Celac, in order to carry out collective efforts:
- Installation of educational servers in Venezuela for the creation of a special repository of Celac university experiences, in the context of the new distance educational training.
- Two hours of production so that Latin American governments and universities can broadcast their content on Venezuelan educational television.
- Ratification of the proposal of President Nicolás Maduro to grant 10,000 scholarships in the next 5 years for the study of community comprehensive medicine.
- Diploma -free- in Public Health from the Bolivarian University of Venezuela (UBV) and health science universities available to Celac.
- Conference on university knowledge to reflect on the new normality that must be assumed in order to overcome the pandemic.
It should be noted that the virtual meeting was attended by the team of the pro tempore presidency of Mexico at Celac, the chancellor Marcelo Ebrard, the secretary of education, Esteban Moctezuma Barragá, the undersecretary Maximiliano Reyes, as well as other members of the regional platform.
While for Venezuela, the representation was in charge of the Sector Vice-president of Social and Territorial Development, Aristóbulo Istúriz and by the People’s Power minister for University Education, César Trompiz.