Author Description

When people speak of totalitarian governments in transition, they generally concentrate on their political, economic, and legal systems, and the difficult transformation each of these variables must go through for each individual country to develop into a democratic society and be able to sustain these new changes. Recent studies of the impact such changes have had on Central and Eastern European countries point clearly at the one variable that most of these transitions have somewhat neglected--the role of education in transforming people's values and norms of behavior. In most cases studied, the societies within countries such as Poland, the Czech Republic, and Latvia managed to coexist for a long period of time under the totalitarian states. As one scholar described it, "the people learned to adapt their human behavior to the conditions and parameters set by their government" (Badat, 1995). This paper seeks to define and analyze some of the post-communist challenges these countries have faced during their continuous transition and the role education has played in developing an informed society. The paper specifically examines how teaching civic education in the schools played a role in developing democratic values and norms among its new democratic citizens; and delineates some of the obstacles in the implantation process. The paper makes policy recommendations based on the lessons learned from these post-communist states that can be applied to Cuba in transition. (Contains 1 figure and 41 references.) (BT).