All the so-called structural reforms share a common feature: they are never the result of dialogue and negotiation between the different sectors of society involved in them. There is always an understanding with some sector or with certain people, and they are all vertical resolutions taken in an authoritarian way.
During his election campaign, Peña Nieto met with business leaders and agreed on a number of these reforms, but now in government, he alone decides what proposals to do and how to do them, often without making clear the proposed objective. It is an elitist reformism that excludes dialogue and negotiation.
This can be seen clearly when it comes to the so-called education reform, which has little reform and nothing of education. It can be said that there has been no reform of all that has been proposed. To do that would require consensus and participation by all sectors of society.
There was a business group that took a stand against corrupt union leaders, and all sectors are players in the educational process, such students, parents, rural and [urban] neighborhood communities. Also involved are the educational authorities with their immense and cumbersome bureaucracy, and the Church, which sustains its demands. It must be repeated: all sectors of society are interested in education in Mexico, and they always have something to say.
It turns out that not even those most involved in the problem were taken into account when the reform was developed. Of these, those best qualified to testify to it are the teachers themselves and, indeed, for these reasons they are now demonstrating. None of them or their organizations were asked for their opinion. The imprisonment of Gordillo, which has already been reported ad nauseum, involved a lot of personal revenge, but nothing that referred to the needs of the education system.
The National Union of Education Workers (SNTE), with its traditional mafia leadership decapitated, had nothing to say about it and conceded the reform as a necessary evil. Its members are gagged and unable to act in any way. Their protests, which they certainly had, became simple squeamishness silenced by their own leaders.
Hundreds of thousands of teachers have joined the National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers (CNTE), which has taken on the role that the SNTE should perform in protesting a reform in whose development it was not consulted, despite its being the most directly involved, nor was its opinion asked and, above all, the reform threatens the employment security and work of its member teachers.
In short, the reform is an attack on the system of criminal patronage [clientelism] that the SNTE imposed from the very Secretariat of Public Education (SEP) itself. Teaching positions, and even many of the leadership positions in the education system, now will not be imposed by union leaders, but are to be subject to ongoing evaluation for hiring and promotion. Seemingly that is fine, but it is nothing more than a union-busting technique.
In fact, it doesn't just affect the corrupt SNTE. It so happens that it is an onslaught against all education workers, more than 1.2 million. Many loudmouths who pose as experts on educational issues, most of the time without having fully practiced the teaching profession, tend to devalue the movement of workers claiming self-defense by declaring that there are rules and technical standards of education about which ... the elementary school teachers are ignorant.
I speak as a teacher recognized for my fifty-year career, during which I trained literally thousands of students.... Many of these critics of the teachers were my students. I did not teach them empty slogans like "learn to learn"and "learn to be".
I taught them to think, to read a book, to underline and make index cards; to write. I didn't ask them for written work that I then didn't read. Instead I read with them that which they themselves agreed to do. Now my students make up a legion among the most outstanding in all areas of social knowledge. Therefore, I know why and of what I speak.
At a national level, our elementary school teachers are what we have made them. Many, indeed, scarcely know the alphabet and, although it is a crime to put an ignorant teacher in front of our children, it is far more criminal to deprive them of one who might teach them, even though the teacher might be functionally illiterate. Our rural teachers in their 20's and 30's barely know how to read, but they have removed millions of rural Mexicans from a state of underdevelopment and given them moral and intellectual support for agrarian reform.
The teachers in revolt want to decide their destiny. They do not want to continue being cannon fodder for union mafias breastfed by the government, or for the exploiters of the people, or for corrupt governments that do not take them into account.
On May 6 they presented to the authorities of the SEP a document of analysis that revealed the true reasons for Peña Nieto's reform, and they make their proposals for a genuine reform of national elementary education as well as their demand that this reform be carried out with them, with the parents and their children, and with the rural and urban communities that education should serve. Luis Hernández Navarro outlined that document in his article last May 7. That document wasn't even received by them [the SEP].
The Guerrero teachers also made proposals and initiatives when laws were being developed [in the state Congress] to adjust state laws to the national reform. Guerrero state deputies, including primarily the PRD [supposedly leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution], frankly speaking, wiped up the floor with the [teachers] and haughtily told them, quite simply, that "they had no standing". Some [PRD deputies] dared to discredit the proposals as manifestly inadequate and elementary.
On May 6 they presented to the authorities of the SEP a document of analysis that revealed the true reasons for Peña Nieto's reform, and they make their proposals for a genuine reform of national elementary education as well as their demand that this reform be carried out with them, with the parents and their children, and with the rural and urban communities that education should serve. Luis Hernández Navarro outlined that document in his article last May 7. That document wasn't even received by them [the SEP].
The Guerrero teachers also made proposals and initiatives when laws were being developed [in the state Congress] to adjust state laws to the national reform. Guerrero state deputies, including primarily the PRD [supposedly leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution], frankly speaking, wiped up the floor with the [teachers] and haughtily told them, quite simply, that "they had no standing". Some [PRD deputies] dared to discredit the proposals as manifestly inadequate and elementary.
That the teachers' proposals may be limited does not authorize anyone to disqualify them just because the [teachers] made them. It's not just the local legislatures that must take them into account, but also the federal Congress in order to enact a necessary revision of this reform. Especially if one takes into account that [an un-revised education reform] is going to create many more problems, like the ones we're seeing, of those that it is intended to solve. Spanish original