The rulers’ latest education reforms show how the state and the law serve capitalist interests against the working class. Privatizing education enables a handful of millionaires to turn the educational system into a commodity and get rich from the labor of hundreds of teachers and millions of students and parents.
Education is not just a business for the ruling class; it’s also an important way to control workers ideologically. Their education reforms will promote even more individualist, racist and fascist that ideology the bosses need.
Reforms Push Individualism
The use of evaluations promotes individualism because teachers must focus individually on getting their students to pass standardized tests to “guarantee” their jobs. The imposition of quotas means that those who pay the most get a “better” education. This fosters individualism and racist inequality. The students are trained within the individualist criteria of competition, which is what eventually the bosses need for them to produce in the labor market.
Reforms Are Racist
By using standardized tests, without concern for the cultural, social and economic differences of certain regions, indigenous and marginalized communities will be at a disadvantage and as a result will be evaluated in a racist manner and found lacking. This sets them up to receive fewer resources and increases their poverty and oppression.
In Mexico, the capitalists have concentrated their educational investments in the country’s most industrialized nothern regions. Their decisions generate profits, and do not respond to the needs of the working class. As a result, the southern region has been left behind educationally, which is racist. The educational reforms will worsen this situation by assigning resources based on the results of the evaluations.
The reforms will be used to discredit public education and promote private education. This, in turn, will foster an increase in racist inequality.
Reforms Are Fascist
The bosses need a working class that’s easy to control, is productive but with a minimum of technical training. The reforms, through evaluations, try to standardize our youth with a fascist and competitive ideology.
In the capitalist jungle only the “most capable” survive (meaning those who get “better” evaluations) — those who follow the system’s ideology. That’s fascism. Our youth will be forced to work for miserable salaries under repressive conditions. The reforms create the ideological basis for these conditions.
The Education We Need
Reforms like these are implemented around the world to undermine the working conditions of education workers, break their collective contracts, their benefits and their unions. But particularly this is an attack against the youth and their parents, against the whole working class!
The purpose of these reforms is to reproduce capitalist ideology and allow a handful of millionaires to make a bundle in the education business. We must confront these attacks with the international unity of the working class.
We workers need an education based on principles favorable to the working class — scientific, collective, comradely and which promotes solidarity. Education must be focused on solving the problems and needs of our class. That can only be achieved in a communist society in which workers hold state power. To achieve that, we must destroy the capitalist system with a communist revolution.
For that goal we must build a communist party, not a bosses’ electoral one. This party must fight the bosses’ attacks like these reforms, and must train and educate the working class to build a new society.
The role of the teachers is essential to reach this goal because they have the potential to promote the unity of the whole working class to wrest power from the oppressive ruling class. The teachers also have the opportunity to challenge the individualistic, racist, sexist and fascist ideology that capitalism promotes among parents and students. This struggle is essential to destroying the capitalist system.