Socialist Indoctrination in School Textbooks: The Case of "Coleccion Bicentenario" in Venezuela

We assess the nature and extent of socialist indoctrination in elementary school textbooks published by the government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Our methodology consists of systematically comparing these textbooks with those published by previous administrations. We perform a qualitative comparison by coding relevant categories and a quantitative comparison using text mining. We find strong evidence of socialist indoctrination in the textbooks published by the government of Hugo Chavez relative to those we use as a benchmark. The most common topics present in the former include the promotion of income redistribution, government-provided goods, and collective effort.