ABSTRACT
Under Hugo Chávez’s government, the Bolivarian Revolution has dramatically changed the social, economic, and political landscape of Venezuela. The ratifi cation of the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela (CBRV, 2000) by popular referendum in 1999 provides the normative base for the “re-founding of the Republic” (now ‘Fifth Republic’) as a social and inclusive participatory democracy. Education is ascribed a pivotal role in achieving this objective. The government’s integral, expressly anti-neoliberal and anti-neocolonial development model is rooted in ‘endogenous development’ as conceptualised by Osvaldo Sunkel and collaborators (1993), in which repayment of the historically accumulated social debt constitutes a key dimension. However, the Bolivarian revolution has radicalised the original proposal in the process of constructing a Socialism of the 21st century. The government’s commitment to repaying the social debt manifests itself in a constant increase of social spending, from 8.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 1998 to 13.6 percent in 2006, which does not include the US $13.3 billion directly transferred by the state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) in 2006 in order to fi nance a multitude of social programs, called missions. Over the same period, the education budget was raised from 3.4 percent of GDP to 5.1 percent (Weisbrot & Sandoval, 2007, p. 9).
