Hugo Chavez certainly knows how to shore up his socialist consensus in Venezuela for the long term: ban all schools from teaching anything else. He has already ensured that college level students won’t be able to study medicine without first pouring through Marx’s Das Kapital and some of Fidel Castro’s speeches. But his tactics for co-opting private schools into his preferred ideology could really do with some refining. After all, his aggressive stance is attracting a lot of bad press. If he had only studied New Labour tactics, he could have learnt how to bring many private schools to their knees without anyone noticing!