What do education workers do?
By Fernando Buen Abad Dominguez: It is one of the most devilishly difficult jobs. It seems to be a constant need to remember the significance of the work of those who coordinate to provide education, which, by the way, is not just any dedication or any job. It cannot be understood as a "gold mine," a "gold mine," or an easy "job," because it is one of the most complex and delicate challenges, extraordinarily sensitive, at the heart of social needs and reality, under the current material contradictions and class struggle.
It is crucial to understand the significance of work in education, with its administrative or academic varieties, within the dominant class structure and ideological reproduction. It has the responsibility to keep the critique of bourgeois education alive, subjecting it to a dialectical examination that explains theory and praxis, structure and superstructure, consciousness and materiality. It must permanently question the problems of education in the ideological reproduction of one of the institutions of the status quo, through which the ruling class imposes its conditions of existence. This is how crucial and demanding work in education is. Millions of people are under its responsibility.
If the ruling class controls the means of production, it controls the production of ideas, and education is one of the main objectives of such domination. In the bourgeois educational system, education is a space for the manipulation of thought and the subordination of people. From childhood, there is a danger of being trained to accept the social structure of exploitation as something "natural." "The bourgeoisie has stripped all the once venerated professions of their sacred aura and turned them into mere wage earners" (Communist Manifesto).
It is a danger for any family that education reproduces the ideology of the ruling class, which manipulates minds to insert them into its productive apparatus. This is how difficult the work of those who educate in such a context of contradictions is. From primary school to university, obedience, competitiveness, and submission to authority are imposed as individualistic values. This education in capitalism is instrumentalized for the reproduction of the labor force: "The education of the worker, to the extent that it is not an ideological mystification, is limited to the development of skills that make him useful to capital" (Capital).
A priest’s creature comforts: Chickens, grandchildren and God. The globe and Mail In capitalism, education is not oriented toward integral development, but rather toward the production of meek and grateful workers. The most conscious educators are committed to confronting the bourgeois divide, even among the workers themselves. As Marx thought: "The educator himself must be educated" (Theses on Feuerbach). We must coordinate and educate in practice so that this vocation, which seeks to train individuals capable of developing the capacities of all, is not weakened or defeated. Education must not be a commodity; that is, we must end the privatization and commodification of knowledge. We must overcome the separation between theory and practice.
We must defend the certainty that education cannot be limited to the transmission of abstract knowledge, but must be critically engaged with productive activity and the transformation of society. How can we change education without first changing society? Education under capitalism cannot be entirely liberating if education workers are trapped, hemmed in, or extorted by the dominant ideology. Achieving a truly emancipatory education requires a dynamic social revolution, driven by its own dialectic.
Here, pedagogy finds one of its most crucial missions: to train critical individuals who not only understand the world, but also transform it. Lenin believed that “the proletarian school must educate not only educated workers, but revolutionaries” (On Proletarian Education, 1920). This is a very special task with a very high historical responsibility. In the pursuit of an emancipatory and emancipatory education, it is clear that the coordination of education workers is not a mere blind consequence of the economy, but a field of dispute for the emancipation of the working class. Defending the workers who defend education, with the most conscious and combative theses and actions, must produce unbreakable solidarity as an act of consciousness-raising and emancipation, because “education does not change the world, but it changes the people who can change the world” (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1968).
Hence the importance of coordination for teacher struggles, popular education projects, and the construction of a critical pedagogy. There is no liberating education without collective organization, without combative unions, without resistance to neoliberal reforms and bureaucracies that attempt to turn education into a market and students into commodities. In the face of the neoliberal offensive, revolutionary education must reaffirm itself.
In struggles, the history of popular struggles is taught, political economy is understood, and the media is denounced as instruments of domination. As José Martí said: "Be cultured to be free." These struggles of education workers are a trench of ideas and coordinating consciousness. "Education is either praxis or it is the chain of the oppressed." Thus, whether in the Zócalo or in Chiapas, the education worker in struggle does not shy away from the challenge. Let us not forget Ayotzinapa.
Bureaucrats fear education workers because they study and train on the edge of class struggle and science, against bureaucracies and with miserable wages.
Every struggle of education workers is a school that teaches from the people and from rebellion, teaches us to break the cages, teaches revolution. "Educate yourselves, because we will need all our intelligence": Gramsci, or as Martí wrote: "Be cultured to be free." Or as Marx exclaimed: "Education must be emancipatory, never an instrument of oppression." That education workers should not give in is a morality; that they should not bend their voice is an ethic; that they should not forget to sow insurrection is a new humanism. Because their struggle is a tool of knowledge and wisdom for an extraordinarily sensitive revolution. It makes sense.
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