The scenario by which the "new" PRI gives priority to the old practice of leadership alliances is made possible through the Pact for Mexico with the complicity of the PRD and PAN. It seeks, thereby, to legitimize Enrique Peña Nieto and smoothly impose the structural reforms. One of the first was the education reform, imposed without taking into account the views and participation of teachers, students, parents, specialists, and the National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers (CNTE) or the experiences generated from alternative education projects in Guerrero, Oaxaca, Michoacán, Chiapas and Mexico City.
It is a practice of the current ruling class to wage a media war against teachers with phrases like, "You should give them the stick ... You have to apply the full rigor of the law ... You should imprison those troublemakers ... They ought to be fired." These are some of the expressions that incite the population against the teachers.
On April 3 during the forum, 'Mexico with Quality Education for All', Enrique Peña Nieto said that Boca del Rio [the city where the forum was held] is the capital of the state of Veracruz [the capital is Jalapa], and then justified his blunder by saying that even the President is sometimes wrong. After that, he said he will not allow setbacks or pressure on the issue of education reform. Earlier in the Peña Nieto administration, Emilio Chuayffet [Secretary of Education] said, in his authoritarian style, that whoever fails [the teacher evaluation] will go, adding "this is neither negotiable nor can it be deferred."
Coparmex, [Employers Confederation of the Mexican Republic] in the words of its President, Juan Pablo Castanón, said that if there is a work stoppage by teachers, they would open their offices to give extramural classes in coordination with parents and asked that the Secretariat of Education not pay the salaries of the teachers who do strike.
These forms of government intimidation only promote confrontation and justify repression of the teachers, as demonstrated last Friday in Guerrero.
The list of reasons why the CNTE opposes the education reform includes its being anti-democratic, centrist, pro-business, commercial, ambiguous, inadequate, incomplete, regressive and punitive. Regarding instruction, it contains no elements of true reform; there is no precise and comprehensive proposal for the transformation of education and the national education system. Regarding the call for quality, it is not defined and it doesn't set forth a process that will make it possible.
Socially, it will impact the poorest sectors, deepening segregation, marginalization and social exclusion. Culturally, values of national identity, solidarity, unity, patriotism and ethical principles are replaced by economic categories that arise from globalization, such as effectiveness, efficiency, competition, productivity, standardization, individualism and consumerism, transmitted through the indoctrination of dominant cultural patterns.
It imposes a single form of thinking across the curriculum and standardized testing, with uniform knowledge and consistent responses, violating the rights of vulnerable groups and the orignial [indigenous] peoples, without taking into consideration an intercultural approach.
CNTE's strategy to address changes to Article 3 and 73 of the Constitution has followed three routes:
- Political, with extensive and growing demonstrations across the country, using the tactics of mobilization and negotiation, and has obtained direct dialogue with federal and state governments, but no significant progress.
- Legal, with the filing 130,000 petitions for amparo ['protection', i.e. injunction], which will increase on April 10, [date of next national teachers' protest] when it will include parents and normal school [teachers college] students.
- Instructional, with the defense of the public school, the construction of alternative education projects, conducting forums and the National Education Congress to be held from April 25 to 28 in the Zócalo [main plaza] of Mexico City, which seeks wider participation of students, teachers, parents, researchers, social organizations and unions, in contrast to the lack of participation in the creation of the so-called education reform.
Specialists have categorically stated the consequences of this reform, because it is the synthesis of neoliberal education policies imposed by the OECD [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] in Mexico over the past twenty-one years, with negative results. These include increased dropout rates, failure, lack of education, reduced availability and lower graduation rates, which have deepened the gap of poverty and marginalization of the Mexican people. The constitutional amendments are aimed at the dismantling and privatization of education through independent management of the schools, which intends to make parents responsible for school maintenance. It also involves changing the rights of teachers, the organization of labor and contractual relations.
The challenge for the movement defending public education is to side step the broad campaign of the powers that be that seek to advance the privatization of education by developing alternative educational proposals that have as their axis the comprehensive development of children and youth to build learning for life, i.e., for the transformation of nature, society and thought, with a humanistic, democratic and ecological character, so that the public school is an institution with an emancipatory function that is needed to build a national project with sovereignty, justice and dignity. Spanish original
*Martha de Jesús López Aguilar is a teacher of primary education with a masters in education research and author of the book, The Teachers' Movement in the Spring of 1989.