La Jornada: Editorial.
Translated by Stuart Taylor
The official celebration of Teachers’ Day took place yesterday under particularly difficult circumstances for the country’s teachers. On top of the persistence of an antidemocratic, authoritarian and corrupt “charro” trade union ["cowboy", slang for a union that colludes with the governement employer] --still prevalent features despite the imprisonment of Elba Esther Gordillo, head of the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE) – there was also a campaign of media lynching and criminalization of the education policy protests, particularly in communities with a considerable presence of democratic teachers’ unions such as Guerrero, Oaxaca and Michoacán. Additionally, there came a consequent exasperation of thousands of members of this guild who were faced with a lack of representative channels and dialogue with the education authorities.
Such exasperation was evident yesterday with the numerous teacher marches within ten communities in the country, including the capital, in protest of the education reform recently announced by the Government and imposed through an arrangement made from above without consulting those on the front line in charge of executing it. Aside form the current indignation, teachers’ anger is arising against the backdrop of a policy that, in conjunction with the beginning of the neoliberal movement, has been characterized by a worsening of the conditions of the stagnation and abandonment of the State’s education programs and by teachers who have been pushed to the lower end of social ladder. This is demonstrated by the stunted growth (less than 4%) experienced by the SNTE in the salary negotiations a few days ago, which inevitably reminds us that Mexico’s teachers are among the poorest paid in the nations that make up the OECD. To the previous we must add the desire, within the framework of the aforementioned constitutional reform of education, to deteriorate the state of the working conditions of the country’s teachers, to threaten their job stability and their right to collectively negotiate, and to move forward in the virtual privatization of its employment centers.
That process of decaying the future of the teaching profession, as commented on yesterday in this paper, has gone from being an environment of personal and collective mobility and development, to representing a socioeconomic stagnation and regression for its members. It acknowledges the loss of an elementary notion in public opinion and official discourse. Teaching in general, and teachers in particular, must be seen as a solution to the multiple challenges the country is facing rather than an additional problem.
In the current climate, the chances of achieving an improvement in education, like the one heralded by the signatories of the Pact for Mexico, are practically zero. This is not because of poor quality or a lack of teachers’ abilities, but because the necessary changes are in stark contrast with the economic and political interest of the clique that manages the SNTE and of the federal authorities themselves, not to mention the unlikelihood of developing the educational policy that the country needs in the context of the economic, neoliberal guidelines still prevailing in the current administration. As an obligatory condition, the education bailout requires a State policy that will free public education from privatizing fanatics like union chiefdoms and, above all, one that will give back teachers the dignity and social value that they deserve. Spanish original