FIST RAISED HIGH! OPEN BOOK! 46

According to the anthem, the Crusaders, as “Sandino’s sons and daughters” (line 14) would use literacy workbooks (line 3), notebooks and blackboards (line 9) to carry rural and indigenous people out of their darkness (line 15), ignorance, error (line 5) and “centuries of incivility” (line 7) into the revolution’s light (line 15) that the young crusaders would provide during four months of literacy education.

The crippling deficits accrued by farmers were linked directly to their lack of formal schooling. The solution was basic literacy: learning to read and write one’s name,

revolutionary slogans and basic arithmetic (addition and subtraction, mostly). The

46 “Avancemos brigadistas, guerrilleros de la alfabetización. Tu machete es la cartilla para liquidar de un tajo la ignorancia y el error. Avancemos, brigadistas, muchos siglos de incultura caerán, levantemos barricadas de cuadernos y pizarras, vamos a la insurrección cultural. ¡PUNO EN ALTO! ¡LIBRO ABIERTO! Todo el pueblo a la Cruzada Nacional, ganaremos el destino de ser hijos de Sandino convirtiendo la oscuridad en claridad.”

Sandinista’s design, content and teaching methods reflected deeply-held beliefs about teaching and learning, the role of formal schooling in development, and learners. I look at these beliefs in the following section because Ortega interjected them into teacher

responsibilities, mandates and discourse. I explain how Ortega and Murillo revived the Crusade in government policies and programs in an attempt to raise awareness and teacher commitment to their contemporary Human Development Plan. By aligning the popular Literacy Crusade to Ortega’s Human Development Plan and projects, Ortega embedded the Sandinista beliefs, actions and outcomes that the Crusade embodied to his current efforts. He used the Crusade to incentivize teachers and high schools students to implement Sandinista programs and projects while inviting them to adopt Sandinista values and a commitment to ongoing societal transformation by following in the footsteps of the Crusade’s Brigadistas.

For those who embraced Sandinista values, this strategy in values education resonated strongly. Many teachers who did not embrace Sandinista values often rejected the imposition of overtly political party values. Some chose to replace overtly political values with what they perceived as related Christian or patriotic values (see chapter 9). Other teachers (whose political party identity was Liberal or otherwise anti-Orteguista) focused on how their political party beliefs clashed with those the government embedded in values education, and chose not to implement certain actions or actively boycott them due to what they cited as their overly politicized nature (see chapter 9).

The Crusade in contemporary times. The experience gained through the Crusade defined formal schooling under Ortega. Government and elementary teachers’ primary academic focus remained fixed on basic literacy with the additional components of community education and teacher consciousness-raising about Ortega’s national project.

Ortega reincorporated the waterfall of learning into teacher professional development with the nation’s 55,000 educators. The waterfall provided information, proceduralized actions and supervision criteria in monthly evaluation and planning PD as well as more punctual PD sessions. All PD included themes related to Ortega’s project, like Sandinista values and values enactment through implementation at the community level in the government’s social development programs.

The MINED’s annual school calendar included commemorations of the Crusade throughout the school year. In 2009, Ortega decreed the Crusade anthem the Education

Hymn of Nicaragua for students to pay homage to the crusaders and their accomplishments each day in school assembly. School principals, rural teachers and urban high school students did an annual illiteracy survey in their respective school communities to help the government plan its national literacy program. High schools initiated a graduation requirement in which students in their final year had to teach adults in their communities to read and write. Ortega revived the waterfall of learning in teacher professional development, providing replications of replications of replications in monthly planning and evaluation workshops (TEPCE) and an unprecedented 32-session PD effort in 2013. And partisan politics seeped into formal education in curricular changes, verbal orientations regarding monthly values education activities, and professional development that educated teachers about government policies and programs – so they would educate families in their school communities.

Contemporary commemorations of the Crusade in and out of schools were usually linked to current literacy campaigns – to involve people in efforts to lower illiteracy once again. These parallel campaigns from the past and present were examples of who Nicaraguans were and what they could become when they worked together for the common good. In 2013, the MINED used the same slogans and phrasing from the Crusade as it sent teachers and students to collect illiteracy data locally, door to door, inviting older Nicaraguans to

“eliminate ignorance with one slice” (MINED INFORMA, March 2013). The government then launched a coordinated literacy campaign in all government institutions nationally and in Municipal Town Halls to reduce illiteracy among government workers. They launched a similar campaign among Cabinets of the Family, Community and Life; Sandinista Youth;

Councils of Sandinista Leadership; local Literacy Councils; and teachers to “raise

consciousness, motivate and help protagonists, youth and adults and Cabinets of the Family to appropriate literacy as a project of the government” (MINED INFORMA, December 2013). Using anti-imperialist and revolutionary rhetoric to inspire youth to join government literacy campaigns, Ortega and government officials regularly “urged [youth] to continue [Sandino’s] legacy in a new era” (MINED INFORMA, February 2013), positioning their

Photo 4. Sandinista Youth do literacy census, MINED INFORMA.

efforts as a contrast to when “education was in the hands of a publicity campaign promoted by imperialism” in which it was “obligatory to learn and repeat on exams that Sandino was a bandit, an assassin, and that Somoza was a hero, that Somoza was a patriot” (MINED

INFORMA, February 2013).

Government officials used the dueling historic memories as an effective recruiting tool of youth to incorporate them into Ortega’s national project. The Crusade was a vehicle to remind youth of their responsibility to respond to the challenges of new historic

circumstances and to remember how education “‘[evolved] our way of being, and our way of acting, working with humility, studying, innovating, growing from the complementary nature of being Men and Women’” (MINED INFORMA, February, 2013). The young crusaders were a symbol of the potential of Nicaraguan youth and how much the country needed their energy and focus to make Ortega’s project a reality in every community. It reminded people of the power of solidarity, walking with the poor, and education; it was proof of how

amazing things happened when those more fortunate united to help less fortunate

compatriots. Crusade commemorations – along with others – were an opportunity to remind Nicaragua’s youth that they were capable of responding to the country’s needs and being successful.

Ortega overtly injected partisanship in formal schooling just as the Sandinistas had during the Crusade.

“The imposition of Sandinista hegemony is something that disrupts even today,” Fauné (2014, n.p.) wrote in her analysis of the Sandinista revolution in rural areas. School principals as Sandinista spokespeople enforced partisan imagery and activities in schools that often divided teachers who held different political beliefs (see Photo 5, FSLN/Sandinista flag in classroom). Overt political objectives of monthly values education activities and campaigns divided adults in and out of schools. Politicization often meant full compliance and implementation of orientations received from supervisors through the waterfall of governance – no matter their effects in the school or community, or if they took time away from classroom teaching and student academic learning. Politicization meant

Photo 5. Environmental league in a Managua classroom, MINED INFORMA.

having to work with Sandinista Youth and adult leaders with education subsumed under a political agenda, with a discourse in which “they say they are for the entire community” but

“have a selective and exclusionary origin” (Prado, 2013, n.p.). In an increasingly polarized environment, each political party positioned itself firmly as good versus bad (the other parties), moral versus immoral, values versus anti-values. The increasingly partisan nature of school activities and leadership positions (teachers and parents) carried these same moral positionings. In 2012 and 2013, many teachers decried and denounced “politicization”

creeping into their schools and classrooms, including teachers with whom I worked. They were required to post government slogans in every classroom and posters of Ortega and Murillo in visible spaces, coordinate with local Sandinista leadership, implement values activities linked to Sandinista heroes and events, and help implement government projects outside of school. Like the crusaders, teachers under Ortega were expected to acquire an expanded political objective of community organization and social cohesion around his national project through different projects and campaigns each month. The Crusade’s content, methods and discourse showcased beliefs about teaching and learning that continued in Ortega’s MINED. Teaching was a fairly straightforward procedure that required

motivation to be successful. Experts or those more knowledgeable transmitted information to those less knowledgeable, verbally or in writing. The “waterfall of learning” was effective in transmitting information from a small group of people to a much larger group in succession and over a short period of time. If one was not an expert and still had to teach, one only needed materials with the correct information to transmit. Content as represented in curricular materials were a vital part of teaching and learning – more than pedagogy,

knowledge of learners or classroom management and motivation. The Crusade’s success was based on thrice-replicated trainings in which recently trained trainers taught youth in ten days how and what to teach rural adults. Uniform content was vital to make learning a success:

everyone learned the same content in the same amount of time in the same manner. The Crusade has a national, Spanish-language curriculum as did Ortega’s MINED. Student learning was each student’s responsibility making teacher knowledge of student needs, background knowledge or motivation irrelevant. For the Crusade, learning remained an unknown, unreported and unmeasured; in the MINED, it focused on ensuring a passing grade for most students at any cost, including inflating grades to increase pass rates. Teacher

learning included knowing how to use information learned even if that was not explicitly taught. Teaching and learning were based primarily on motivation: the crusaders were not teachers but they learned how to do it because they were motivated. A lack of educational resources and time were not indicative of whether teaching or learning could happen; the crusaders worked with little more than their motivation and were hugely successful.

In addition to motivation, which people generally believed an individual controlled and a teacher could not influence much, the other main component to teaching and learning was the teacher program or curriculum. It was likened to being a machete in the Crusade anthem (line 3) and by Ortega government officials and teachers. It had all the information a teacher or teacher trainer needed to do their job, as shown through the waterfall of learning and in all formal schooling. The Crusaders did not need to be teachers, or know about the lives, knowledge, beliefs or ways of living and knowing of their students. In academic learning, several teachers explained to me, students were a clean slate and the curriculum provided the necessary content to give them. Teachers only needed to follow official planning and instructional procedures to give the content as prescribed.

Teachers clarified that these beliefs applied to academic learning in classrooms (e.g., literacy knowledge and skills). Beliefs about teaching and learning values coincided more with how the Crusade approached teaching and learning of revolutionary values: through experience, socially with others, by putting values into practice together. This distinction or separation of how academic content and skills should be taught and learned in comparison to values impacted how the government chose to implement values education in schools as a highly controlled set of activities designed and communicated by government officials monthly through verbal mandates announced by local MINED school nucleus leaders.

These beliefs about rurality, teaching, learning and schooling permeated Ortega’s government. Most of the MINED’s policies, national curriculum, pedagogy and professional development reflected an entrenched deficit view of rural life. Ortega used negative

stereotypes about rural life to inform education policies and programs, similar to how they had informed the Crusade’s design and implementation. Despite those beliefs eventually contributing to the revolution’s downfall, Ortega did not change it. He also embraced three complementary qualities in his governance that entrenched those beliefs even further:

caudillismo, contrarianism and loyalty. I explain each of these as well as some challenges

and contradictions they created that Municipal MINED officials, school principals, teachers, community leaders and residents had to accommodate, moderate and mediate in their daily lives and work.

Caudillismo, Contrarianism and Loyalty

In this section, I describe the following three qualities of Ortega’s governance:

1) Caudillismo: Personality politics and strong-man tactics in top-down governance 2) Contrarianism: Policies and programs that distinguish one government from another

3) Loyalty: Devotion, dependability and fidelity required of all public servants Each reinforced the other. Each also had deep historical roots that Ortega expanded upon.

Teachers cited these three areas as working together to create the power of the waterfall, its messaging and supervision. Sandinista-identified teachers tended to view this dynamic positively, while those not identified as such, or who were actively anti-Ortega, tended to view this governance negatively. Some cited how these three qualitites worked together to shut them out of opportunities for advancement, promoted cadre with little to no experience in the classroom who could thus not provide the pedagogic attention they needed and desired, or maintained a punitive environment that sqaushed discussion and questioning of mandates or orientations while embracing unquestioned fidelity to those above them. All agreed that these three qualities affected teachers in their daily practice and professional development.

Caudillismo. As the last caudillo in Nicaragua, opposition figures and regular citizens often described Ortega as an autocrat or dictator, “‘with a little more elegance, maybe, but a dictatorship nonetheless”’ (Anderson, 2014). Ortega’s government demonstrated several common characteristics of caudillismo, including “centralization, personalism, verticalism, oppression, corruption, patron-client bonds, and the willingness to resort to extra-legal practices” (Deonandan, 2008, p. 45). With political and socio-economic power in the hands of one person, caudillismo “limits citizen participation to elections, entrenches elite interests, and excludes the consideration of serious reform from the political agenda” (Close, 2008, p. 6). Neo-caudillos of the new millennium like Ortega manipulated government structures and legal processes through pacts and other political forms of corruption. They used traditional caudillo methods of control like outright repression,

militarism and violence against opposition groups and threats against those they perceived had questioned their actions, motives or legitimacy.

Ortega’s government carefully constructed a personality cult around “Daniel” (e.g., the slogan “Daniel=Good Government”) to gain broad support. Ortega was larger than life physically and figuratively, a survivor and fighter from the 1970s and the only president for many people who helped impoverished Nicaraguans (outside the Sandinista revolution).

People regularly mentioned Daniel or Murillo⁴⁷ in daily conversation as if they knew them personally, responding to “the personality cult around Ortega in songs, discourse, spots and television ads”⁴⁸ Equipo Envío, August 2014, n.p.). Many people agreed that “here the man in charge is Daniel Ortega, he is the accommodating man, the man who knows change, the man who dismantles strikes, the man who suppresses electricity blackouts…With that man we can get things done!” (Equipo Envío, August 2014, n.p.).

Government controlled media, officials and community leaders profusely thanked

“Daniel” for every school built, every drinking water and electricity project christened, and every handout – from the 14 sheets of tin roofing, the stove and other kitchen supplies, and the small animal projects of several chickens and two pigs^xxxviii. The cult around Daniel was so strong that “when the government gives a loan to someone, many people think that the functionary or the President took that money out of his pocket and is doing them a favor and they feel they have an obligation to thank him” (Cáceres, 2014, n.p.). The leader of the only cooperative federation that allowed members from any political party into its organization (all others were segregated by political party membership) raised concerns about the cult personality in politics and a general lack of knowledge that “the government has the responsibility to use [its] resources well, that they are everyone’s” and how “that kind of consciousness does not exist among people [or] public servants” (Cáceres, 2014).

Even more than Augusto Sandino, Ortega’s image was everywhere. One-by-three-story posters in major intersections of every city overwhelmed public spaces. Public servants posted flyers in every school, clinic and government office building while ordinary citizens

47 Also called by her first name of “Rosario” or “La Chayo,” the latter being short for Rosario, and several derogatory terms I do not use in this study.

48 Sobreabundó tanto el culto a la personalidad de Ortega en canciones, discursos, spots y tomas televisivas, como el sectarismo, que desde hace años ha convertido una efemérides que debería ser nacional, en una fiesta cada vez más partidaria, sectaria, sólo dedicada a un sector de la población.

and local leaders posted them on houses, abandoned buildings, bus stops, posts and any blank wall space they could find. People wore Daniel t-shirts and baseball caps that were given away at public events. The Party changed the words of popular revolutionary songs from Latin American artists to celebrate Daniel and his accomplishments. The altered songs repeated over and over at public events and on government-controlled radio stations, while the original revolutionary⁴⁹ songs were silenced. Daniel had reinvented himself many times since the 1970s and his current self was “more acceptable and calm” (Seisdedos & Blazquez Vilaplana, 2007, p. 36) than the revolutionary firebrand of the past; the most current version was “the sweetened image of father, loving spouse, conciliatory leader, religious man” (p.

36). For some analysts, caudillos like Daniel were “incubated by society” and “anti-values of the political culture” that embraced personality politics, sectarianism, and “a magic sense of life that makes them believe that from one moment to the next a redeemer will get us out of poverty” (Equipo Envio, August 2014, n.p.). Years of broken promises and almost half the population living in severe poverty left many voters to “search for a political leader, a savior, who will help them get out of their daily life situation, a save-the-homeland [leader]”

(Seisdedos & Blazquez Vilaplana, 2007, p. 22). Daniel positioned himself to be that leader.

While First Lady Murillo was instrumental in re-creating Ortega’s image as kind, compassionate and generous among his followers and the greater population, she showed a personal willingness to use sledge-hammer politics, particularly among wayward loyalists.

Like traditional caudillos, Ortega used coercion and imposition in governance to meet his objectives. Murillo meted out threats and punishments. She was Ortega’s campaign and marketing manager, Secretary of Communications for Ortega and the Sandinista Party, the head of the government Council of Communications and Citizenry, the president’s private secretary, presidential Chief of Staff, and Master of Ceremonies at all of Ortega’s

commemorations and events. She was said to be in charge of all Sandinista Party posts at all levels, including Mayors and community Cabinet positions. She spoke to the nation each day and publicly aired grievances against loyalists along the waterfall who appeared to either

commemorations and events. She was said to be in charge of all Sandinista Party posts at all levels, including Mayors and community Cabinet positions. She spoke to the nation each day and publicly aired grievances against loyalists along the waterfall who appeared to either