The COVID-19 pandemic, still far from over and now at a new point of escalation, has had a profound impact on all areas of social life. It has affected our habits and behavior, had its economic and political impacts, and has inevitably been felt in education.
Bolsonaro’s politics of denial were expressed in the refusal of the Ministry of Education (MEC) to guarantee broadband access and equal access to information and communication technologies to the public basic education system (schooling from 0 to 17 years of age), the majority of whose students are black. As a consequence, the country’s educational apartheid was further reinforced. Almost 40% of public school students do not have computers or tablets, and yet these students were not guaranteed access to the most elementary resources (printed materials, electronic resources or free internet) for their school activities. On the other hand, students from private school networks, especially those that serve the most privileged social strata, the majority of whom are white, got the resources they needed to pursue their studies, even with the sudden change in routine.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the Ministry of Education’s primary approach has been to not have any clear strategy that would centralize education actions at the national level. This vacuum was filled by the National Council for Education (CNE), which itself is heavily influenced by the big business-led ‘Todos Pela Educação’ (All for Education) group, made up of organizations such as the Lemman Foundation, the Itaú Social Foundation (sponsored by the Itaú Bank), Bradesco Bank and the Votorantim industrial conglomerate. Municipal and state networks have fallen into these fragmented and localized policies that, far from offering solutions that could reverberate into a policy that truly values and appreciates the public school system, has only deepened the inequalities between public schooling and the large private schools. This was followed by a policy of funding cuts, with the loss of over R$20 billion (US$3.85 billion) compared to the 2019 budget; as well as the further advance of mechanisms for privatization. This could all be seen in the debate around the Basic Education Development Fund (FUNDEB), the main source of funding for basic education. After the successful adoption in August of the Proposed Constitutional Amendment (PEC) that makes FUNDEB funding permanent, the government and its allies turned around and approved the removal of R$15.9 billion (US$3.1 billion) from public schools and its handing over to religious schools and the ‘S system’ (industry training directly funded by big business) in December.
State and municipal governments, even those led by opposition parties such as the Workers’ Party (PT) and the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB), were not much better with their limited responses to the educational needs of students. The advance of privatization measures was also a hallmark of the pandemic. Contracts with minimal transparency were signed with technology companies, which swallowed up educational resources, but did not solve the problems of youth access to content and activities in any effective way. Along with this, there was a great mobilization of the big bourgeoisie in Brazil, primarily through the actions of ‘Todos Pela Educação’, to welcome the guidelines from the collectives of bourgeois intellectuals from the advanced economies, such as those from the World Bank and the OECD. Since the early stages of the pandemic, these intellectuals have drawn up policies that “guarantee learning” for children and young people around the world, that is, establishing the facilitation of education through digital platforms as the newest strategy for the commercialization of education – hybrid education. Governors and mayors could have used the suspension of face-to-face activities for over nine months to make structural reforms to school facilities, and put forward strategic plans to solve historic problems such as reducing the number of students per class. Yet despite their clashes on-camera, behind the scenes these same governors and mayors preferred to give in to pressure from private school owners and sponsors, who threatened the lives of students with their proposals to reopen schools. It was the resistance and mobilization of the teaching profession and school communities that ensured that this pressure was not greater, and which welded together a popular majority against the resumption of face-to-face activities in most of the country. An important example was the strike for life by education professionals in Rio de Janeiro, which effectively held the return of education workers back until November. The correctness of this policy was seen when those municipal and state schools that did reopen soon saw a new rise in the number of COVID cases.
If from the students’ point of view, the measures endorsed by the Ministry of Education and the governors and mayors deepened the educational abyss in the country, from the education workers’ perspective, the measures adopted also deepened the attacks on these public sector workers. There are the pension reforms, which include the loss of retirement pensions. There are the measures that have increased the already long working hours in this mainly female sector, who already suffer the triple burden of work, parenting and teaching from home, a burden which has only worsened with remote work (necessary during the pandemic, but no less cruel), and a burden that governments will try to maintain next year through what they are calling ‘hybrid education’. There is also the dismissal of outsourced and precariously employed workers, another expression of the anti-people plan that unifies the different bourgeois factions, which they have publically squabbled over with a view to the electoral contests of 2022.
In this sense, even if we are almost at the end of a year that will go down in history as one of this generation’s most difficult, it is necessary to take advantage of the school recess and vacations to organize the struggles of resistance for next year. Foremost is the struggle in defense of life, to be organized in unity with union federations and centers and the popular movements, which are at this moment demanding a genuine national immunization plan for the entire Brazilian population, a plan that puts education workers in the front ranks of those receiving vaccinations, the only way to guarantee the safe opening of schools.
It is also fundamental to draw up a timetable for the fight for ‘Fora Bolsonaro’ (Bolsonaro Out), the fight against the Bolsonaro-Guedes Administrative Reform, and for the defense of free, quality public education. This fight needs to include mobilizations in each state and municipality around the timetable approved by the National Confederation of Education Workers (CNTE), which points to the participation of the sector in the actions held on International Women’s Day (8 March 8), and the building of the national education strike set for 24 March.
Let’s transform 2021 into the year of resistance in defense of the right of working youth to public education, by defeating Bolsonaro and all his open and covert allies, in the National Congress, the states and the municipalities.
This article is an English translation of “Transformar 2021 em um ano de resistência da educação pública em defesa da vida”, , Esquerda Online (EOL), 28/12/2020.
Translation: Bobby Sparks
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