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Wednesday 25 September visiting professor Bárbara Karell Furé delivered a lecture in Spanish for the 4th year students of the bachelor's degree programme "Foreign Philology: the Spanish language and litreture" and for the students of the master's degree programme "Theory of translation and intercultural communication". She described the system of Cuban education paying a particular attention to the system of higher education.
The students found out that before the Cuban revolution more than one million people living there were illiterate, a bit more than one million hardly could read and write and more than 600 000 people had never gone to school.
After the triumph of the revolution in1959 a literacy campaign started up. In a short period of time illiteracy was eliminated. Today education in Cuba is free and comprehensible and very simiar to the system of education in our country.
The Cuban educational system includes pre-school education, which is not compulsory, primary education (grade 1-6), and secondary education (grade 7-9), compulsory for all school-age children. Only those who want to go to a University attend the high school. The high school graduates take three exams: math, Spanish and history.
The system of higher education in Cuba has several stages, which are called pregrado y postgrado. Pregrado training, corresponding to our specialist's degree, lasts 5 years, but there is also a reduced form of training (4 years). Master's studies (postgrado) last two years. In recent years, distance learning and education for people with special needs have been actively developed.
Today there are 421 schools for children with special needs in Cuba. However they continue their education in regular schools to adapt to their future social life.
At the end of the report the visiting professor quoteв the words of José Martí, a famous Cuban poet, writer and translator: «Ser cultо es la única forma de ser libre», that means «To be well-educated is the only way to be free».