The first thing I did after graduating was to travel to my hometown. I had not been there for three years. At the La Bandera bus terminal I took a bus to Valencia. In Valencia I took another one to Coro. In Coro I had to take what we call a private cart - because I arrived shortly after three o'clock in the afternoon, when the last bus of the public route had already left - and seven hours and two transfers after leaving Caracas, I set foot again in Cabure.
Usually, when I say where I come from, I always start by saying that it is a peaceful town of no more than three thousand inhabitants, located in the Sierra de Falcon, surrendered to the feet of some benign limestone giants. Then, boasting of its unrepeatable natural beauty, I complete by saying that in the language of the Jirajaras Indians, the first settlers of the region, the name of my homeland means "place near the sky". But I believe that from now on, when I say where I am from, before all of the above, which is undeniably true, I must begin by saying: I am from Cabure, the town of the Serrano Bird, the man who one hundred and fifty-two years ago tried to fly with enormous leather wings.
Returning to Cabure meant returning to the place where all my childhood and adolescent memories reside. Few joys surpass that of the reunion with that memory composed of purely happy images that, like a trip back in time, bring me back to the moment of bathing under a waterfall, exploring a cave, or walking the streets of the village with my friends José, Alexander and Anthonella. Returning to Cabure, immediately after graduating as a lawyer from Ucab, also meant coming back to offer my land this important achievement.
The next thing I should let you know about Pájaro Serrano is that this is what they called my great-great-grandfather, Don Carlos Rivero Solar, considered the precursor of national aviation. Yes gentlemen, the precursor. The Venezuelan Air Force (FAV) erected a monolith to him right in the area where he launched himself into the void with the will to conquer the air.
Carlos Rivero Solar was a famous local inventor. His recognition came from the construction of many and varied sugar mills, including a machine to hull the coffee grown in those mountains and a system of bamboo pipes that brought water from nearby streams to his house and moved the sugar cane mill where he ground sugar cane.
It is not hard for me to imagine him making the device that would make him take off from the ground like a bird. I can almost hear him repeating to himself as he assembles the frame of light branches and pieces of cowhide: "Who said man cannot fly?
The story of the Pájaro Serrano was given to us Cabureños practically at the dawn of reason. I, for example, treasure it from the very moment I heard it told by my teachers at the "Sara Amelia Salas" preschool, the only kindergarten in town. Public, yes.
And of course I kept hearing it, already in the form of official version and in honor to the Illustrious Son, both in my school "Manuel Antonio García", as well as in my high school "Guillermo Antonio Coronado", also the only elementary and high school in Cabure. And also public, yes.
My mother spoils me and teaches me
To the stage from first to sixth grade belongs, likewise, the memory of when the teachers, after teaching us basic contents, this as if not to leave, left us hours and hours playing in the classroom. And not because they were pursuing academic goals with playful strategies, no; it was because, obviously, they had no interest in ensuring our learning. More to the point: they simply abandoned us. José, Alexander and Anthonella, classmates throughout that early stage, know what I'm talking about.
Although it is definitely my mother, the great-great-granddaughter of Pájaro Serrano, who knows best: she, unlike me who always studied in Cabure, studied from kindergarten to high school in a private Catholic school here in Caracas. This is because her mother, my grandmother Hilda Hernandez Rivero, the great-granddaughter of the homo avis falconiano, came to this city forty-six years ago. My mother went back to Cabure and, some time after marrying my father, she did a degree in Special Education at the National Open University (UNA), under the distance learning modality. Here is where I should say that I am the third of four children and that my father is a small grocery merchant, owner of a bodega located in the center of town.
After graduating as a teacher, my mother started working in a school in a neighboring town. Do you see why I say that she is the one who knows the most? She knows because she is an educator and she knows because she is a mother. She knows because every afternoon, without fail, at home, she gave me and my siblings painstaking private lessons in all the subjects we studied: from mathematics, language and biology, to social studies. I think of those afternoons and I can almost smell again the smell of the copies of the Caracol de Santillana Guide and the Larousse Encyclopedia, which my mother put in our hands to complement, or supplement, the deficient education we received at school.
The high school at "Guillermo Antonio Coronado" I can't credit anything different from the unfortunate elementary school: the same idleness of the teachers, the same laziness, the same incompetence, the same carelessness and unconcern. José, Alexander and Anthonella, also high school classmates, know that I am not lying. In short: the same fraud. I can once again credit my mother, for all the help she continued to give me from first to fifth grade, with a large part of the credit for my high school.
It was from her that I learned my favorite part of the story of the famous Pájaro Serrano's exploit. And it begins one Sunday morning in 1868 with my great-great-grandfather heading, with his flying apparatus on his back, towards El Naranjito, the hamlet near Cabure where he is going to try to defy gravity:
He is going along the Camino de los Españoles towards the top of the most favorable hill for the accomplishment of his feat. It is worth imagining that he is carrying a flying machine like the ones designed by Leonardo Da Vinci because, in fact, they have a certain resemblance. He has been accompanied by Don Rufino Montenegro, whom, in accordance with custom, he has named godfather of the historic event. He is followed by a crowd of people, a crowd of locals in a procession of disbelief and amazement.
I can almost hear the murmurs and laughter. And I wonder how many of those who go there are betting on its failure and how many believe it is capable of crossing the infinite blue of the mountain range.
I wonder because I suddenly remember the afternoon about six years ago when, on a visit to Caracas, I went to a shopping mall with my mother, my two sisters and a cousin from Caracas. We walk and talk while looking for a greeting card for our grandmother's birthday, and then the cousin asks me: "What career are you going to study, in which university? I answer without any caution, perhaps with the confidence that springs from innocence: I am going to study law at UCAB. My cousin, who has done all his education in the best private schools within his reach, who knows about mine and the economic hardship of my family, asks the usual question: Do you already have a scholarship? And without even waiting for my answer, he says: "You are not going to make the grade. People who come out of the public sector are unlikely to graduate from a university like UCAB.
To glory or to the grave
How many of those who go there, behind the one they call "doctor" but also "crazy", believe in him and want him to fly? How many do not? Anyway, Don Carlos Rivero Solar is already about to offer the outcome: so he advances, alone, with his wooden wings and cowhide, to the highest point of the hill, about seventy meters above, while the expectant crowd remains below. Upon arriving at the exact spot set up as a runway for takeoff, the Serrano Bird greets the spectators, turns around and begins the race to propel himself to the awaited flight. Everyone falls silent in front of that winged man who runs determined to glory or failure, who races towards success or death. A few steps from the end of the field, he spreads his wings and jumps with a shuddering cry. Already in the air he flaps his wings desperately. He seems to be succeeding. In fact, now he is gliding. Incredible! He is achieving the miracle of flying... But, ah, joke, no, no, no, he is falling, oh, my God, he is coming down, he is going to crash! Oh, oh, he crashed!
The Serrano Bird and what was left of its wings fell on the top of a leafy Bucare tree. He didn't die, but he was left pretty battered and with a few broken bones.
When I told my cousin, today a successful doctor, that I was going to UCAB, it was because by then, when I was finishing my high school, I had already made up my mind. Since I was a child I wanted to be a lawyer. I had the option of studying in Punto Fijo, in the only university in my state where they offered the career; or to come to Caracas, to my grandmother Hilda's house, and study where I had always wanted to with all my strength: at the Law School of the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello. My parents facilitated my decision by encouraging me with the second alternative, even though it represented a tremendous financial commitment. I remember that in the face of the natural concern about the possibility of paying my tuition, on that decisive occasion they both told me that such a higher education, one of the best, was worth any effort. I also remember that after that family resolution, the only thing I was not happy about was the idea of leaving Cabure and saying goodbye to José, Alexander and Anthonella.
I remember two scares from my first year at UCAB: the natural one of any beginning in a new place and the one that assaulted me when I started to face contents that I did not master and that I was supposed to have seen in high school. I am not exaggerating: I felt a kind of daze every time a teacher gave a lecture on a subject unknown to me. The discomfort was accentuated when my classmates -most of them from private schools- would tell me: "We saw that in high school". That is what my cousin was referring to, and I confess that at one point I feared that, even if I made an effort to catch up, I would not be able to meet the demands of the subjects. To be honest, I didn't think I would make the grade.
From that initial frightening turbulence, I came out of it with flying colors by reading, reading, reading.
It was already flying over the second year, in 2016, when I was surprised by the bad weather: My dad had to close his winery. It was impossible for him to work with so many shortages of products, so many controls and so many government arbitrariness. He had no choice but to close and with all the pain in his soul inform me that he would no longer be able to pay my college tuition. This is much more than the first two scares, this is a greater fear, this is fear of rushing so soon, just taking off. This is...as I explain...panic of crashing over the top of a Bucare tree.
Looking for financial help counts as a desperate flapping of wings; although the truth is that my desperation was literal, not metaphorical.
So I immediately inquired and, since I met the conditions of academic average and socioeconomic profile, I applied for a scholarship-job. Who said that man cannot fly? A few weeks after the interview, I received the news that made me soar again: I was approved for the scholarship-job in the offices of Sipucab, better known as the teachers' lounge.
I worked at Sipucab every day, Monday through Friday from three in the afternoon to seven at night, in exchange for tuition exemption. I think of those four years and I think of a time that lifted me high enough to understand that when harsh reality holds you back, with that same force it propels you forward.
I was in those clouds of joy on the day in January 2020 when I received my degree from the hands of Rector Francisco Virtuoso. And imagine how many thousands of feet of pride my mother, my father and my grandmother Hilda were. And even more so after they too received the homage that our professor and godfather, Antonio Canova, paid them in the form of that memorable speech on synchronic and diachronic happiness.
Under the beautiful ceiba tree
Meeting again in Cabure with José, Alexander and Anthonella counts as part of the first thing I did after graduating.
One sunny and warm afternoon, the four of us met again where we always have: under the generous shade of the ceiba tree that presides over the front of José's house. Did I mention that José is also my neighbor?
José is twenty-four years old, a great athlete and one of those people who easily and quickly win people's affection. When he graduated from high school in 2014, he tried to study a technical career in electricity at the Tecnológico de Coro, but because of so much stoppage due to student protests, teachers' strikes, lack of water, or electricity, or teachers, or whatever, he lost the sense to continue. "Why stay in a place that is closed for longer than it is open? I preferred to go back to Cabure".
José returned to the village and got his girlfriend pregnant. Today they live together, already have a second child and are going through a rather difficult economic situation.
Alexander is also twenty-four years old and is a true artist in pencil drawing and oil painting. You have to see his work to be impressed with the level of detail and beauty. He started studying Electrical Engineering in 2013 at the same Tecnológico de Coro that José dropped out of. He should have graduated by now, but he has not been able to yet, and not because he does not apply himself to his studies but because of the same constant stoppages that my other friend already referred to.
Alexander has had no choice but to continue and state his future in an attempt at a joke: "I hope to finish someday..."
Of Anthonella, another twenty-four-year-old, we must always start by saying that she is the local table tennis champion. Then we must add: she is a real fitness enthusiast. She obtained a place in the Unefa (National Experimental University of the Armed Forces) of Coro by assignment of the Opsu (Office of Planning of the University Sector). And six months after graduating as a Systems Engineer, this is what she exhales: "The truth is that this Chavista university is useless. They didn't give me a degree, they gave me a four-year course that was poorly taught". She says that she was spared from the strikes of the autonomous public universities but not from the academic mediocrity of the government university.
My friend has not been able to get a job as an engineer. In her own words: How am I going to get a job in my field, being a graduate of a yellow-top university? Anthonella is making a living working as a cashier in a small grocery store in Coro.
Nostalgia traveled by my side all the way back: from Cabure to Coro, from Coro to Valencia and from Valencia to Caracas. As much as I was also traveling towards the beginning of a new life, towards the long-awaited professional debut, there was no way not to feel sorry for leaving again my town, my family and my friends after those two extraordinary weeks.
In those ambivalent days of longing and enthusiasm I got my first job as a lawyer at the Chacao Cultural Center. That was less than two months before the outbreak of the Covid19 pandemic and the beginning of this agonizing confinement that has left no space undisturbed. With the imposition of the quarantine, following the first confirmations of contagions in Venezuela, the cultural complex of the capital's mayor's office was suddenly without activity. And I with him, so, taking advantage of the long hours of isolation at home, I dedicated myself to explore new job opportunities. It was only in May that I joined the legal team of the renowned real estate group where I currently work.
It was in those failed days of initial confinement when Tania, who had just graduated with me, called me to ask me if I wanted to join Un Estado de Derecho (UeD), the civil association directed by Professor Canova. How could I not want to if I already had news that other recent graduates were also joining the non-governmental organization made up of brilliant lawyers graduated from Ucab and other universities, in addition to outstanding professionals from various disciplines.
UeD, thus with the lowercase e for state, is dedicated to the study, understanding and dissemination of the values and principles of the Rule of Law as an indispensable condition for individual freedom, democracy, development and progress of individuals and peoples.
With the "yes, I want" I was joining, from the start, the team that investigates the current reality of the right to education in Venezuela. I had already fulfilled the main entry requirement: I had already read The Beautiful Tree. Anyone who has been a student of Canova in recent years knows that there is no way to avoid reading the book written by James Tooley, professor at the University of Buckingham. He knows, therefore, that there is also no way not to end up rethinking everything one thought about education after being confronted with his findings.
I would be lying if I said that I enjoyed The Beautiful Tree: how could I, a "son" of public education, like a book that evicts it? I would also be lying if I say that I assimilated everything from the start. The plain truth is that, apart from suffering from it, I incurred in the same attitude of denial faced by its author when he decided to inquire about the existence of private schools for the very poor: for the poorest in poor countries such as Ghana, Nigeria and Zimbabwe in Africa; for the poorest in the poorest areas of India and China.
The descriptions of the "lazy" public schools in those distant places I could not refuse, because they simply spoke to me of the same laziness of Cabure.
He who seeks...
Hidden in those impoverished corners, Tooley found, because he searched, private educational initiatives that emerged as a response to the deficient or non-existent state education. He found, because he looked, parents who prefer to spend part of their meager income to pay for their children's education rather than leave them in free public institutions. He found because he searched in spite of what all, absolutely all, the researchers of all, absolutely all, the most emblematic organizations in the area of Human Development told him: from the UN on down, they warned him that there was no such thing as the poorest poor educating themselves.
To themselves insofar as they dispense with state provision and resolve to pay one or two dollars a month for an education better than the public one. Tooley achieved them in each of the countries where he searched: The Beautiful Tree is a document of extreme scientific rigor and is at the same time the inspiring testimony of that endeavor.
It is, I reiterate, a difficult report to metabolize, because all the evidence contained in it overturns the prevailing conception of the provision of the right to education....
...the conception that the provider has instilled in us, the idea with which the provider educates us. That is to say: it shakes the dogma of the teaching State and therefore also weakens the whole corpus of beliefs that sustain the current (statist) doctrine of social rights. Nothing more and nothing less.
For me, as I said, it took time and doubts. I had no trouble at all subscribing to Tooley's questioning of the indisputably deficient public education; but from there to favoring its disappearance?
The fact is that as I progressed through the story I was understanding, but at the same time I was feeling a kind of guilt for understanding, an inevitable and annoying sensation of betrayal of my origins. Until I slowly and uncomfortably realized that this unspecific discomfort was precisely the proof of how deeply rooted the statist doctrine was in my head.
And the other fact is that although I found the discoveries of The Beautiful Tree enlightening and unobjectionable, for some reason (...) I flatly denied that here in Venezuela there could also be manifestations of poor people educating themselves.
And it would have remained so, it must be said, if Canova, stubborn as Tooley, had not found the Cuyagua school in Petare and dozens of other private schools, in various parts of the country, with tuition fees of less than two dollars.
I myself, as a researcher at UeD, have already hit upon some low-cost schools in my state of Falcon.
No, in Cabure, as I said above, there is no private school: in my town the only option is public education. "And that's the one you're going to write a report about, one like María José España's report about the Cuyagua de Petare," the professor told me.
By telephone, because in Cabure there is almost never internet, I interviewed José Ramón Miquilena, director of the "Manuel Antonio García", the school where I studied, founded eighty-four years ago.
Manuel Antonio García was a distinguished educator born in Coro, who at the end of the last century, around the time of Pájaro Serrano, settled in my town and began his pedagogical work in the School for Boys together with teachers Clodomiro Muñoz and Rufino Montenegro. With the same Rufino Montenegro who sponsored the famous flight of my great-great-grandfather Don Carlos Rivero Solar.
The "Manuel Antonio García" was created in 1937, on the basis of the unitary school, with only first grade, which at that time was run by the teacher Rito Hernández, my great-grandfather "Ritico", my grandmother Hilda's father. But only three grades were added, that is, only up to fourth grade. Fifth and sixth were paid: they cost a half a day that could be paid with a twenty-five cent bolivar coin, two of a locha or two liters of freshly milked cow's milk.
The "Ana Brillet" School for Young Ladies, directed by teacher Ángela Irausquín, also preceded the "Manuel Antonio García" School. It was a private initiative, just like the School for Boys, like almost all of those in those times of the incipient State.
Tell me who educates you...
At present, my school is a two-story main building, enlarged with three sheds. It has eighteen classrooms, a playground, a court, a stage for events and a dining room for the students.
The principal is a teacher with a master's degree and has been running the school for fifteen years; that is, since my elementary school days. Today there are 465 students and 45 teachers, he told me right away. And with the same, already in the case of exposing me the situation of the "Manuel Antonio Garcia", he told me about his main concern: the degradation of the teaching quality.
He told me more: today 90% of the educators who teach at the school are graduates of the Bolivarian University of Venezuela. Firstly because the discredited UBV has a center in Cabure and secondly because it is the order issued by the Educational Zone of Falcon. The issue is that there is no room for teachers graduated from other universities, no matter how solvent and better prepared they may be. The positions in the "Manuel Antonio García" and in the other public universities are not assigned based on professional capacity but on a political scale that begins with being registered in the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (Psuv).
As an example, my mother still has the button of the time she was demoted from being the director of the educational unit for special children "Eduardo Marín" to being a classroom teacher in the same institution in Cabureña, for not being registered in the ranks of Chávez's party. It happened in full view of all present, in a meeting of municipal directors, when the local political coordinator ordered loudly, referring to my mother: "They are taking that squalid woman out of that position". And so it was: my mother was punished, demoted, simply for not being a member of the Chavista party. Two years after that sentence for disloyalty, she managed to start recovering her professional rank and today she is the deputy director of the psycho-pedagogical unit of the "Manuel Antonio García" school.
The second major concern of Director Miquelena is one that, no matter how often repeated and general it is, is always overwhelming: practically non-existent teachers' salaries, the indignity of a basic salary -for an educator with a twenty-year career- of 769,304.01 bolivars per month in a country plagued by hyperinflation. We are talking about the absurdity of an official base income, adjusted in May 2020, equivalent to 2.6 dollars per month.
It is a pay so absurd that it almost made me put off for later the next issue that I intended to clear with the director, a core aspect to which Tooley devotes much of the attention: the issue of mechanisms to prevent, correct and/or sanction absences and other faults of educators. I did not leave it for later, but I did lower the tone of the questioning. In this regard, Professor Miquelena referred to the Regulations of the Teaching Profession, which regulates everything related to the performance of teachers. It establishes, among other rules, that after three unjustified absences, teachers can be dismissed; but according to the experience of the director of the "Manuel Antonio García", very rarely, indeed never, is there a dismissal by this means. The most that is reached in the event of non-compliance -he added- is a verbal exhortation or a written memorandum from the director. And then, if anything, from the Education Zone.
My point: A public school principal in Venezuela cannot fire a non-compliant teacher. The system is designed to make it difficult, if not impossible. And this is what a humble mother from remote Ghana states simply and emphatically in El Bello Árbol, when she notices the difference with the private school she sends her children to. She observes that in public schools, teachers are absent and nothing happens, because nobody cares. On the other hand, she also perceives that in private schools, a director cannot afford the same thing, since he or she is paid and is obliged to pay for it.
Finally, the worst and in the form of a painful statistical truth: only 30% of those who study elementary school in the "Manuel Antonio García" reach university. This is neither an official nor an exact accounting, warns Professor Miquilena. It is, however, a numerical approximation that expresses the observable reality of Cabure: 70% of those who go through elementary school, and even complete high school, do not reach higher education.
Poverty, when not. Because even to study in a free university in Coro requires resources that most people in my town do not have. Studying in this or any other city implies paying for housing, food, study materials, transportation, etc... That on the one hand, and the same need, which forces one to work, on the other. I am aware of the number of former high school classmates who, upon graduating from high school, immediately had to earn a living. Something that, by the way, they do without feeling frustration; because it is worthless to deny that most of the students from Cabañas do not reach the university also for lack of motivation, for lack of aspiration, because they do not see the sense of continuing their studies, they simply do not even think about it. And how can they want to fly if their wings have been cut off.
No one craves infinity if they do not believe they are capable of reaching it. There is El Pájaro Serrano, hanging all beaten up on the top of the bucare, for having believed himself capable of flying the sky with false wings. You can see him managing to get down among the branches and you can hear him shouting that he is fine, not to worry, thank you very much to everyone and that he is going back home by his own means.
Well, nothing. He even has fractures. Well, nothing. I think he is in bad shape, although more in his soul than in his forty-two year old body. It seems to me that he prefers to stay alone with the regret of his broken dream. In the eyes of the people who approach him to help him, what has just happened in El Naranjito is nothing more than the shocking occurrence of a character touched by the bogeyman.
How can the boys from Cabure want to fly to the university if they don't even have wings made of wood and cowhide to at least try to do it, if what they have as their only option, because they are poor, is deficient and indoctrinating education?
With these questions I begin the descent into the five final impressions of this document, which is at the same time my starting point for further research:
One: From public education one can no longer expect anything but fraud. To continue believing, at this point, that the State can provide this right efficiently is to continue believing in the fictions that politicians tell us. It is to continue believing, for example, in the fantasy that at some point, who knows when, the State, the same one that has caused the present educational misfortune of Cabure, will be able to guarantee the people of my town a quality education.
Two: The current public education in Venezuela, instead of being a vehicle for social mobility, is an unappealable condemnation to more misery. The people of my town know it well. Education and poverty as cause and effect: they do not study because they are poor and they are poor because they do not study.
Three: Canova is right, although it has been hard for me to admit it: I am not what I am, a university graduate, "thanks to" public education, but "in spite of" it. And I am a minority, almost an exception. I am one of only 30% of the Cabureños who make it to college, but you know how hard it was for me. They know that if it had not been for the vision and the loving effort of my mother in each of those afternoons of classes at home, I would not have felt able to reach and make the grade. José, Alexander and Anthonella also belong to that select 30% and you know how they are doing. Should we, my friends and I, be grateful to public education? And what should society be grateful for? That it sentences the remaining 70% to a life of shadows and hardship?
Four: A true quality education for the most needy is possible, based on two freedoms: that of parents choosing among many non-state options and that of education entrepreneurs competing to offer the best service. This is the basis of the proposal we are working on at UeD, where we are committed to ensuring that not a single Venezuelan student is left without being able to afford a private school. In this sense, we promote the implementation, proven successful in several countries, of the so-called school vouchers. At the same time, we encourage a national conversation on the forms and criteria for the eventual application of this direct subsidy. In any case, the State is responsible for guaranteeing the right through the financing of the aforementioned vouchers, thus preserving free education. The State participates, but in a limited and exceptional manner, neither as a provider nor as a teacher.
Since that Sunday in 1868, there was no more news about El Pájaro Serrano, beyond his growing fame as a crazy inventor. It is known that he continued to dedicate himself entirely to his other ingenuities. Some say that he also worked secretly, observing the flight of the sparrowhawks, to perfect the design of a new pair of wings that he never used.
wings, which in the end he never used. While he was alive, no one recognized the true significance of his daring attempt. No one there, in the Cabure of 150 years ago, could imagine that a man could fly like a bird. No one in the world had ever done it. And what could the good but illiterate Cabureños of that time of tender ignorance have known? You really had to be crazy, to have your head empty, like Don Quixote of La Mancha, to undertake such an enterprise. My great-great-grandfather lived the rest of his life without receiving the slightest tribute, without any homage. It was almost a hundred years later, around 1959, that the fascinating and incomplete story of El Pájaro Serrano reached the ears of someone in the Air Force. The part that did arrive was considered sufficient and indisputable to confer on him the title of Precursor of Flight in Venezuela. I think of all that and I think that, although very late, at least posterity settled its debt of honor with Don Carlos Rivero Solar. That is why I also think of the many who at some point also launched themselves to important conquests, opened roads, and yet remained ignored or, even worse, considered as insane.
And, well, I cannot help but think of the madmen who, with no other weapons than the ideas of individual freedom, venture to fight against the giants of a communist dictatorship. I think of the great triumphs, but I think more of the small ones. I think, for example, of the daily victories of those Venezuelan families who are paying what they do not have to get the best education available to them. Thinking about all that is what brings me, finally, to bow in reverence before the parents who, with no other option than public education, are determined and manage to send their children flying towards the firmament of improvement: I was able to get from Cabure to Ucab thanks to the wings of desire and confidence that my mother gave me. Isn't that another true feat?
**
El Pájaro Serrano died at the age of seventy-eight, in 1904.
I don't know if he was aware of the great news that, in 1903, the Wright brothers made.
Angel Tajha
