This new school year that began in March 2023 “positions us in a place of alert and conflict as education workers,” says the internal document accessed by EL ECO.
And then they emphasize that “although starting the courses always means great happiness for us, since we meet our students again and receive the new generations, we must place on the table a series of elements that allow us to ensure that we do not start the same as always”.
The teachers affiliated to the UTU Officials Association (Afutu) indicate in the document that this school year 2023 begins under the following general conditions:
1. With a million-dollar budget cut that translates into fewer teaching hours, fewer charges and class groups. Also job insecurity for teachers.
2. With an imposed educational reform, without the support of the teaching community and a rejection expressed in all possible areas of teacher participation: Technical Teacher Assemblies of all subsystems, union organizations and other organized groups.
3. In addition, practices of union persecution have been installed, protected by the LUC, to which are added, according to facts of public knowledge, espionage and discrimination against workers and students.
1. Budget cut.
The scandalous decrease in the economic budget allocated to Public Education has a negative impact on the exercise of the right to education of thousands of students. The salary reduction of teachers and civil servants, the building deficiencies, the lack of affiliates, psychologists and social assistants, service and administrative assistants, among others, the helplessness felt by many students who do not have the necessary support to sustain their educational trajectory and a long list of problems, whose origin is in the lack of economic resources that this government imposes, cannot be made visible by any advertising campaign or by false promises of educational transformations or by unfulfilled announcements of construction of new school buildings.
In order to get a complete idea of how this new year that we are beginning will be presented in terms of the budget aspect, it is important to know the precedents. During the first two years of this administration, there was a $150 million cut to the education budget. The examples as to the way in which it was executed are many.
2. Why do we oppose this “educational transformation”?
Because we understand that Integrated Basic Education (EBI) blurs the aims of public education that we defend, an education for all, emancipating the working class.
This reform reduces educational quality, as it bases its model on two elements: competency pedagogy and emotional education. The first element prioritizes competencies to the detriment of academic content, that is, it places emphasis on know-how, to the detriment of knowledge. The areas most affected by this change in model are those disciplines that promote critical thinking, to which fewer hours will be devoted and a more superficial approach.
The other element introduced as “innovative” by this reform is emotional education, from a logic that aims to “tame” future generations in managing frustrations and conformism as keys to a successful future job. From our political-pedagogical interpretation, this reform places educational institutions at the service of capital and the neoliberal project that seeks to produce cheap labor and submissive to the demands of a market that only favors big capitalists.
3. Union persecution and espionage.
We are in a position to say that we are certain that this government, as well as the education authorities, use the public media to persecute and harass workers who do not share the political ideology of the government in power. It is worth mentioning what happened to the teachers of San José who were persecuted and punished for adhering to the campaign against the reform on police security promoted by Larrañaga, an action defined by our federation as an organized collective. Despite the assessments that can be made regarding the fact, we denounce that throughout the administrative process that this situation required, the authorities condemned the officials involved, sanctioning them from the beginning of the process with dismissal from office and withholding of assets.
