In the city of Panama, the second week of June, the “Second World Educational Congress: Pedagogical Alternatives, Union and Union Resistances” took place, with the participation of unions and unions of educators from Latin America, with the unwavering commitment to defend the right to education public for all social sectors.
A consensual diagnosis was made stating that public education is a fundamental human right, an indeclinable obligation of the States, to reduce the social gaps derived from the social origin of class; the urgency of a radical transformation of the school system that implies reviewing the conditions of teaching work, wages and salaries, social security and the right to a dignified retirement.
It is clear that the struggles of the teachers are part of a broader framework of disputes against the owners of capital that subject the working class to conditions of ever greater misery and precariousness; The student body is another sector that is hit hard by educational neoliberalism, it is devoid of rights, without a voice in the face of educational policies, a youth without its own thought, subjected, but that despite this rises up, also expresses itself for a new education and a society that offers better living conditions.
At the same time, the unions of educators, with the active participation of the UNE, denounced the “progressive neoliberal turn of Unesco in the last three decades, building a web of discourses and imaginaries to place education at the service of market interests.” .
The event emphasized that “social mobilization is a fundamental way to denounce educational neoliberalism and build consensus”; For this reason, they made a call to multiply, from the unions and schools, the spaces for training, plural debate and meeting, which make it possible to stop the global offensive that the technological corporations, the chulquera banks, multilateralism and the false philanthropy that they intend to attack civil society organizations; But what capitalism tries to impose is one thing and another thing is the resistance that the peoples and the progressive teachers will oppose, to defend public education and demand greater social investment from the governments of the day, primarily in education and health.
For now I will highlight two of the conclusions: 1. Reject the various forms of attack by neoliberal governments that seek to turn education into a commodity; and, 2. “combating capitalism that wants to blur the identity of educators.”
Given this, teachers say that we build our identity from popular mobilization and encounter with other social sectors. If capitalism wants us locked up in our classrooms, we decided to open the windows to breathe the air of change and we went out into the streets to meet with our colleagues and the people in all territories, with the popular movements, the youth, fighting for a society of unity, social justice and for a better world.
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