Haiti, September 10– As a new school year begins across the northern hemisphere, ruling classes across the globe herd working class teachers and students back to classrooms and school systems designed to reproduce capitalist social relations: racism, exploitation, and poverty. Communist teachers, parents and students are faced with a dual task: battle like hell now for immediate improvements in learning conditions while never losing sight of the larger fight for communist revolution.
At a recent conference run by a local reform organization, the Haiti Adolescent Girls Network, Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members provided a model of raising communist ideas inside the bosses liberal reform organizations.(see box). The stated purpose of HAGN is to “support the rights and emancipation of girls and young women in Haiti.”
It was recognized by Beyonce for its work in 2013 (haitigirlsnetwork.org; www.beyonce.com) and is allied with the Abundance Foundation, and the liberal Harvard-based philanthro-MDs Steven Kahn and Paul Farmer. Harvard was built by slave labor, financed by slave trading (Wilder, Ebony and Ivy), pioneered the racist pseudoscience of eugenics (Harvard Magazine, March/April 2016) and to this day remains a nerve center the U.S. ruling class imperialist main wing. The same big fascists that invented napalm at Harvard, for the purpose of butchering workers during the Vietnam war. Now they want us to believe they are friends to Haitian girls, but our comrades and friends are not fooled.
Liberal parasites prey on Haiti’s youth
Under the Harvard-led liberal imperialist world order, education for the children of the Haitian working class is a disaster. 40 percent of children aged 5-15 don’t go to school at all, and 60 percent drop out before finishing primary school to help support their families. Only 20 percent of eligible students go on to high school. Schools for the children of the working class lack toilets, running water, walls that reach the ceiling and libraries; in rural schools, the teachers are not trained and often have not completed secondary school
In the coming school year, as liberal education bosses pose as fighters for education reform, comrades everywhere must fight to raise our Haitian comrades’ analysis of schools and capitalism, which holds true worldwide.
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No future for working class youth under capitalism
Education in a society which prioritizes the production of wealth to the detriment of human beings has lost its sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. Such a society cannot really produce free or liberated women and men, integrated into their society and truly productive human beings. The preparation of the child so that she/he has a “secure economic situation” in later years is nothing but an illusion. Education does not guarantee anything under a system of exploitation—capitalism—for the masses of workers and their children! Daily, in fact, schools pass from what should be their objective, developing the student fully as a human being and cultivating the ability to realize her/his full potential, to the student becoming merely a cog in the wheel of the bosses’ system. And the schools are required to reinforce the inequalities of the system as a whole. They prepare individuals to be blind to what’s really going on, who cannot see the true from the false, the good from the bad.
Children don’t all have the same opportunities in school. Your level of education depends upon what the bosses need you to become as an adult. If you are to work in a factory/sweatshop, basic reading, writing and math are all that is required. If you are to work in the fields, even less is required. If you will be needed to be a teacher or a lawyer or a doctor, then of course you will get more education.Those children who don’t even have the opportunity to go to school at all will become the unemployed workers of the future, working in the informal sector, selling a few loaves of bread or some carrots on the street.This is why the various churches, private institutions and the State want to control education: their interest is to see that school doesn’t let the children flourish as human beings who question this system based on exploitation and inequality and that is truly dangerous. It is thus necessary to really transform education, not just reform it, and members of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) will fight tooth and nail alongside students and their parents at all levels in the struggle for a better life, a decent life.
But in the end, a system that is based on inequality, that creates rich and poor, bosses and workers, doesn’t deserve to exist. And that means we must fight for the destruction of the capitalist system that forges inequalities of all kinds, exploiting women and men, for the sole purpose of building or multiplying capital for a very small minority. So our struggle to end this exploitative and dehumanizing system embraces the transformation of education as well.Children are the adults of tomorrow, and you have a choice: resign yourself to being exploited or fight back , not just for yourself and in your hometown, but for all the children of Haiti and elsewhere around the world. Together we can fight back and win.