Gilberto Guevara Niebla* went straight to the point: reform of basic education
"...entails diminishing the power of the SNTE [National Union of Education Workers] to manage the education system. This power includes, on the one hand, the power of the union over some secretaries of Education and the undersecretaries of certain federal states," he said at the forum 'Mexico With Quality Education for All.The forum was held as part of the public consultation that is the President's legal obligation in order to formulate the National Development Plan.
"The primary loyalty of these officials is to the SNTE or the CNTE [National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers is the dissident wing of the SNTE], rather than to the education authority [SEP, Secretariat of Public Education]," he said, thus putting on the table what everyone knows, but few dare to express.
Guevara spoke directly to the President of the Republic, to the head of the SEP and to a section of the SNTE from the state of Veracruz that was present (some of whom slipped away from the meeting before Guevara spoke). It is necessary, he noted, to reform the Regulations of General Working Conditions, which date from 1946:
"The SNTE's control of teaching positions is an out-dated perversion."
Teaching positions have to be subject to competition. In this respect, it is clear that there are many provisions that need to be reformed. It is obvious that on the academic issue "historical conquests" cannot be claimed because, as we have stressed in this space, [these claims are made] in the midst of a higher interest ... the education objective: the interest of children and young students. An incompetent teacher is not a teacher. It is a crime to have an incompetent teacher in front of a group of students. Teachers are not the original culprits: since the 1960's successive governments have abandoned the public elementary school, and the result is in plain sight.
Guevara spoke for society when he stated "the inheritance and sale of teaching posts by SNTE members is a perversion". The probably more than 2,000 people in the room applauded loudly, while the President committed before the public attendees and the media--through looks and gestures exchanged with Secretary Chuayffet [SEP], to put all that trash in its proper place. The positions of director, inspector, supervisor cannot be SNTE positions, as happens today, but must be positions of trust in the education authority--emphasized Guevara speaking very quietly--and in the hands of qualified professionals, I would add.
Participants' joy resulted in applause, while the little island of fifty or so SNTE members who are now doing very well for themselves kept a furious and bitter silence.
Afterwards, Juan Díaz de la Torre, teachers' union leader [successor to Elba Esther Gordillo, who is now in prison for corruption], who throughout the ceremony sat stone-faced beside Chuayffet, Díaz made a predictable complaint during panel remarks:
Guevara spoke for society when he stated "the inheritance and sale of teaching posts by SNTE members is a perversion". The probably more than 2,000 people in the room applauded loudly, while the President committed before the public attendees and the media--through looks and gestures exchanged with Secretary Chuayffet [SEP], to put all that trash in its proper place. The positions of director, inspector, supervisor cannot be SNTE positions, as happens today, but must be positions of trust in the education authority--emphasized Guevara speaking very quietly--and in the hands of qualified professionals, I would add.
Participants' joy resulted in applause, while the little island of fifty or so SNTE members who are now doing very well for themselves kept a furious and bitter silence.
Afterwards, Juan Díaz de la Torre, teachers' union leader [successor to Elba Esther Gordillo, who is now in prison for corruption], who throughout the ceremony sat stone-faced beside Chuayffet, Díaz made a predictable complaint during panel remarks:
"The researcher (Guevara) has the right to speak, but fundamentally it seems that he has not ceased to be a student leader."
Díaz has not ceased to be, nor will he cease to be, a corporate head.
Mexican Corporatism
Mexican Corporatism
The positions occupied by the SNTE not only in the education sector--and the insane influence that the SNTE has exercised for decades amid a corruption of rot allowed and even sponsored by successive governments--is one of the blackest areas of Mexican corporatism.
As in all areas, eradicating corporatism in the educational area is an imperative for the national future. Surely, it will be a struggle amid the trash that the SNTE has thrown at generations of Mexican children and families, but it will be dismantled if the President fulfills his announced commitment to education. It's the only way the Presidential commitment can be translated into the State's recovery of educational leadership.
Electoral-democratic reform and the alternation [from PRI to PAN governments] not only failed to dismantle corporatism, it exacerbated it. Mexican corporatism was not a spontaneous product or a historical necessity born out of the Mexican Revolution. Corporatism was explicitly adopted as a copy of Italian fascism. It is a system that implies the integration of citizens of a country into the State apparatus by means of corporations, whether in the form of civic and neighborhood associations, of tradespeople and shopkeepers, trade unions and employers' associations, in order to maintain the established order and guarantee the participation of the State as a mechanism of governance (as Jorge Robles summarizes the intervention in 1932 by Deputy Ezequiel Padilla, Calles's [President Plutarco Elías Calles] man and former ambassador to Italy).
In the world of work, the corporations are none other than the worker unions and employer unions. ...
Corporatism uses organizations as the transmission belt that links the individual to the State apparatus with the aim of guaranteeing effective implementation of relevant legislation in each sector, trying to maintain social control of the entire population. With the collaboration of successive governments, the corrupt policy of teacher corporatism sank basic education in Mexico.
"Just as the United States defends its class struggle, its free competition ... and just as Russia does not support the class struggle ... the fascist system wants neither one nor the other: it seeks balance, coherence, the cooperation of classes. Such was its basic premise." Words spoken by Ezequiel Padilla in 1932.
Corporatism is alive. Spanish original
*Gilberto Guevara Niebla is a professor at the College of Education in the Faculty of Arts of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and editor of Education 2001. For over twenty-five years, he has worked in the field of education as professor, researcher and official. In 1992 he was named Undersecretary for Basic Education at the Secretariat of Public Education (SEP). He has published essays, books and been a contributor to various print media, including Nexos and Etcetera magazines; the La Jornada and El Universal newspapers; and he wrote the short work Democracy and Education (1998). In recent years, Dr. Guevara’s academic interest has focused on moral training and civic education.