Denise Blum

author of Cuban Youth and Revolutionary Values: Education the New Socialist Citizen

February 4, 2012

A former public school Spanish teacher, Denise F. Blum is an Assistant Professor in Social Foundations at Oklahoma State University, teaching Qualitative Methods, Comparative Education, Pop Culture and Education and Educational Sociology. She is an educational anthropologist and received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Her interests include Latino/Latin American K-12 education and anthropology of education.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Havana's secondary schools, Cuban Youth and Revolutionary Values is a remarkable ethnography, charting the government's attempts to transform a future generation of citizens. While Cuba's high literacy rate is often lauded, the little-known dropout rates among teenagers receive less scrutiny. In vivid, succinct reporting, educational anthropologist Denise Blum now shares her findings regarding this overlooked aspect of the Castro legacy.

Despite the fact that primary-school enrollment rates exceed those of the United States, the reverse is true for the crucial years between elementary school and college. After providing a history of Fidel Castro's educational revolution begun in 1953, Denise Blum delivers a close examination of the effects of the program, which was designed to produce a society motivated by benevolence rather than materialism. Exploring pioneering pedagogy, the notion of civic education, and the rural components of the program, Cuban Youth and Revolutionary Values brims with surprising findings about one of the most intriguing social experiments in recent history.

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2012-honorees/denise-blum

Last Updated: 21 December 2015