In the early colonial era, education by the Roman Catholic Church served a minority of wealthy landowners who, though illiterate or barely literate, sought schooling for their sons in the manner of Spanish aristocrats. The notion of education for a privileged few reflected a rigid, hierarchical social system that distinguished between the man of letters and the man who worked with his hands. The distinction between manual labor and more "artistic" or creative pursuits became deeply ingrained in the value system and affected the educational system as well. The high prestige attached to orthodox and philosophical studies channeled resources and talent away from technical and scientific fields at university levels and produced curricula at the primary and intermediate levels that ignored the vocational needs of most of the population. In an abstract sense, the highest ambition was to be a pensador -thinker, a man of ideas, an intellectual, rather than an inventor or a técnico.

Education in Venezuela is free and compulsory for children between the ages of 6 and 15. The adult literacy rate in 2001 was 98 %. The nation’s 15,984 primary and preprimary schools had a total enrollment of 4.3 million pupils and were staffed by 185,748 teachers; secondary schools had an enrollment of 378,000 students.