By destroying the teacher, the neoliberal West is destroying something even more important: our self-awareness!
Much has been said about the crisis in the West and especially in the European Union. The discourse has focused mainly on the energy, military, social or migratory crisis. However, these crises are the result of a much deeper evil, representing, above all, the victory of ignorance over knowledge, of the individual over the collective, of the economic over the social.
Contrary to what many may think, it is in the Western countries themselves that the neoliberal plunder operated by the oligarchies has intensified the most. We could even say that this looting is increasing at the same pace that decreases that of the peoples that belong to the global majority.
But, to the misfortune of those who live there, this dichotomy goes further: the more aware the peoples from the global majority have been about the predatory nature of the Western oligarchy, the less aware the Western peoples are of the reasons why their living conditions are worsening.
Western peoples are in a counter-cycle with the peoples of the global majority, in every way. As the latter gain self-awareness, the former become increasingly unaware of their own being, alienated as they are from their roots, cultures, families, communities…
A fundamental vector for the production of this unconsciousness, translated into a growing critical and analytical incapacity on the part of Western populations, has been precisely the area of education.
The degradation of public education systems is not only one of the most repugnant characteristics of the systems that succumb to revanchism, historical and scientific revisionism, it is also the driving force behind this reactionary process.
So it came as no surprise to the more informed that a study by EDULOG, a Think-Thank of the Belmiro de Azevedo Foundation (one of Portugal’s leading multi-billionaires, who belonged to the Forbes list of richer persons in the world, now deceased), drew the following conclusion, among many others: “The teacher shortage crisis is becoming systemic in all OECD Economies”.
Among other reasons, the study points to: “the deterioration of the image and status of teachers; the unattractiveness of salaries and working conditions; the lack of prospects for progression and career development”.
This study brought to mind (a criminal thing in the West) that, back in 2002, during the government of “his eminence”, Dr. Durão Barroso, former Prime Minister of Portugal, former President of the European Commission and trusted man of Golden Sachs, a process of reducing teachers’ salaries had intensified, masked in the form of an “evaluation system”, which, masked as a system for measuring the quality of teachers performance, ended up reducing their salaries and, above all, their career progression.
I wonder why Professor David Justino, Minister of Education at the time, didn’t take into account what the CGTP-IN teachers’ unions (the largest trade union confederation in Portugal) told him.
In particular, they warned about the damaging consequences that his attack would have for public schools, the teaching profession and students. Look what would have been saved in disastrous studies and policies.
If we were naïve, we’d believe that David Justino couldn’t have foreseen these things at the time, but the naivety we don’t have is proportional to the lack of backbone on the part of someone who once attacked Portuguese teachers and, 22 years later, did a study concluding that the policies he defended at the time were all absolutely wrong.
The arguments that are the conclusion of this study were, at the time, used against the Durão Barroso government, of which David Justino was a member.
It’s funny to think that today, Ursula Von Der Leyen’s European Union is inviting European trade unions and employers to celebrate a “European Pact for Social Dialogue”, when they have repeatedly disregarded all proposals and arguments, empirical, scientific or otherwise, that go against their plans for war, concentration of wealth and suppression of sovereignty, and with it, the limitation of national freedoms.
As history proves, the result of such intense “social dialog” between education unions and successive governments was the “elevation” of the Secretary General of FENPROF (National Teachers’ Federation), Mário Nogueira, to the number one public enemy, one of the ruling oligarchy’s favorite hatreds.
Every time he warned that the destruction of the teachers’ statute would result in the destruction of public schools, the army of commentators and journalists on duty accused him of “corporatism” and of only caring about teachers.
It’s reminiscent of the U.S. when they accuse others of doing, or wanting to do, everything that they have already done, want to continue doing and want to be the only ones who can do it. Exceptionalist opportunism is one of the most odious expressions of American neoliberal supremacism.
Today, Ursula von der Leyen is so preoccupied with “competencies” that she even forgets that she is part of the organization that was partially in charge of the damned governing Troika (IMF, ECB and EU) that followed the 2008 crisis, introduced in Portugal by a Socialist Party government (in name only, it’s a social liberal party) and very strongly continued, with a government from the Social Democratic Party (in name only, it’s pure and hard neoliberal), in coalition with the Democratic Center Social party (in name only, it’s a party made of the most reactionary oligarchy and nostalgic about fascism), which promised to “go beyond the Troika” proposals, producing a kind of a neoliberal shock in the Chilean or Argentinean way.
All this with the approval of Durão Barroso, then President of the European Commission.
It was during this period that there was an abrupt disinvestment in public spending on education. To say that this scenario is based on what happened in the U.S. and the UK would be redundant. It would be to fail to understand what political factors caused this situation and where they were imported from.
But if there is one thing that this study, like all studies of its kind, never does, it is to make the connection between these disastrous public policy results and the economic theories that the West exports and wants to impose on the whole world through the IMF, World Bank and ECB. It’s no wonder that many see what happened in Kazan last week as a historic event.
After all, if there is one thing common to all these countries, it is that they are trying to assert their economic, political and social sovereignty, rejecting the liberal (or neoliberal) “paradise” envisioned by Fukuyama.
For these reasons, looking at the conclusions of this study is like experiencing déjà-vu, reliving in a tiny fraction of time all the hours, days and years of heated political combat by all those – like myself – who vehemently opposed (and oppose) neoliberalism, the Washington consensus and the charlatanry that, disguised as a technocratic discourse, allegedly pragmatic and devoid of scientificity, have aimed to divert huge amounts of resources – produced by labor – to the ruling oligarchy, with damaging and disastrous results for democratic normality itself, which today is threatened by the return of fascism and Nazism.
Already in 2015, the study points out, a group of researchers concluded that the likelihood of choosing a profession “increases with the perception that it is a pleasant career, with a good working environment, colleagues who collaborate and with whom good professional relationships are established, having a job guarantee with long-term contracts”.
Furthermore, “more recently, an extensive study carried out in several countries (BCG, 2023) identified the characteristics most valued in a job: stable employment, with a good balance between personal life and work; fixed working hours that don’t drag on into the weekends; a salary compatible with qualifications and the possibility of career development; the possibility of negotiating conditions adapted to the individual situation, including adapting working hours, vacation periods and retirement plans.”
Faced with such conclusions, the time has come to be sarcastic: who would have thought that people, workers, want stability, adequate salaries, fixed and not too long hours, career progression and the ability to negotiate, vacations and good retirement plans?
I wonder how many studies are needed, how many billions of euros have to be spent, how many Think-Thank have to be founded by billionaires, to come to this “brilliant” conclusion. Whether for teachers or all workers in general.
It is worth asking where the policies about deregulating the labor market, destroying collective bargaining, defending job insecurity and flexible working hours fit in. Where do the proposals to “contain labor costs” and “promote labor mobility” fit in, as we find, in a repeatedly sickening way, in the normative compendiums of the EU, the Federal Reserve, the ECB or the IMF.
At a time when the West, and Europe in particular, is grappling with serious labor problems, an ageing population and a race for human resources, just to keep wages down; at a time when tools such as Artificial Intelligence are being developed and it is becoming possible to produce in greater quantity, with better quality, in much less time and consuming even fewer resources; at a time when there is so much talk of the fourth industrial revolution, automation and digitalization; few, very few, argue that all this innovation, this brutal increase in productivity, to which are added the state subsidies, the ones that are lacking in public services, and the tax relief for the ruling oligarchy, all these factors that are themselves the result of work, must be reproduced in the improvement of the living conditions of those who gave life to these resources..
On the other hand, the same voices that silenced the Kazan conference, that hid the Kiev regime debacle, that told us that the Russian Federation and that “evil” Vladimir Putin wanted to conquer the whole of Europe; the same voices that silenced, consented to and were complicit in the Palestinian genocide; are the same voices that, despite all the empirical and scientific evidence, continue to believe that the solution is to further intensify the measures that are failing so badly.
It is to be welcomed, however, that the EDULOG study at least says that governments should avoid doing what they have done across the board: “lowering (and deregulating) teacher qualifications; extending teachers’ working hours; increasing the number of pupils per class”.
At the same time as scientific studies say that politicians should not have to “lower the teachers (or any other professional) qualifications”, the European Union, anxious to attract migrant labor and even more anxious to save money on their integration and qualification, has adopted an “Agenda for Skills” instead of an agenda for qualifications, for valuing professions or work.
Don’t think that this is unimportant or a coincidence. The objective is quite clear. Once again, the aim is to make qualifications and professions more flexible and deregulated.
To free national qualifications systems from the need to invest in more structured education and training processes, on a longer duration, but with a wider range of knowledge and skills, resisting obsolescence and outdatedness for longer and enabling a wider range of professional choices, the EU is promoting the atomization of the qualifications system, with a view to reducing investment in the structural training of individuals, promoting a logic of short or very short term logic on training, but without the support of key skills essential for personal, social and professional development (literacy, numeracy, critical thinking, digital skills, etc.).
Once again, things like “micro-credentials” are being imported from the U.S., in an attempt to reproduce in Europe all the educational and training cancers that can be observed in the imperial center.
Coincidentally, the EDULOG study itself tells us that not only are the U.S. and UK already suffering acutely from the problem of teacher shortages, but that they are unable to solve it.
When I think back to the 80s and 90s about the role my teachers played in my life, I never forget that teachers were a fundamental pillar of our individual and social development. It was absolutely unthinkable for me or a colleague of mine to speak ill of a teacher in a gratuitous way.
The crisis in the Western education system is above all a reflection of a deep moral and ethical crisis.
The brilliant but banal conclusions reached by this study – this one and many others – are belated and, above all, anachronistic. Historical experience, scientific knowledge and analytical tools made it possible in 1989 (the year of the Washington consensus), as today, to see how wrong those political proposals were.
There was no shortage of warnings, criticisms and well-founded analyses about the real intentions and the fallacies set up to distort reality and justify an illusory sense of movement. All of them were and are sidelined, if not persecuted and ostracized.
At the highest level, people do as this study does: they never link the causes and conclusions to political experience.
To do so, they say, is to “ideologize”, not to do so is to “pragmatize”. And this justifies and whitewashes the candidacy and election, however precarious and democratically unrepresentative, of all those who defend the error and, even more seriously, its continuation and deepening.
Decades of North-American multiple-choice tests in which students are told what to think instead of being made to think for themselves, of bureaucratization and commodification of education, the attack on public schools and the destruction of the individual and collective status of teachers, were the vehicles used by neoliberalism to achieve what fascism did with illiteracy and analphabetism: convince the people that their interests were, in reality, the interests of the oligarchy that oppresses them.
To achieve this, the development and use of an essential cognitive tool for any human being was removed from the teaching programs: dialectical analysis, i.e. the ability to analyze reality in movement and as part of a historical process.
In doing so, they managed to present a unicist and unifying version of history, the liberal version. History was over and it was important to convey this fact, making people believe that not only was another reality impossible, but that it wasn’t even desirable.
To achieve this end, all undesirable and dangerous experiences for the oligarchy were demonized. Today, when we see the BRICS phenomenon, the U.S. presents it as a kind of “union of autocracies”. This is a compliment, a compliment borne out of fear, the fear of being left behind.
In this neoliberal world, to get to the top, the key is to know how to operate, but not how to think.
Stoltenberg couldn’t answer the question of how many invasions China had carried out in the last 40 years) or how many bases it has abroad; Portugal’s Defense Minister, Nuno Melo, didn’t know what NATO stood for, calling it the North “Athletic” Treaty; von der Leyen believed that Russia was removing semiconductors from washing machines…).
In a world where knowledge is pernicious and dangerous to the ruling oligarchy, it’s no wonder there aren’t enough teachers. No wonder their image has been degraded and destroyed, driving young people away from the profession.
No wonder the West is the world of populism, fake-news, post-truth, color revolutions, contested electoral victories, judicial coups d’état and alternation without alternative. In this context, the teacher becomes a character who is not only redundant, but also unwanted.
The public school teacher, who organizes himself and students into classes, who transmits, thinks and makes people think, is persona non grata.
In a system that promotes individualism and narcissism, where the heroes are those who get rich on the back of billionaire public contracts, the teacher is still, despite all the limitations, a precious social link, still representative of our social connection, and can give it cohesion and a sense of unity.
In this sense, the destruction of their image, of their status, is an inevitable consequence of the acceleration and intensification of the neoliberal process, a system that thrives precisely on isolation, loneliness and social disconnection.
The teacher, as the link between beings in a community, is being crushed by a system that dreams of seeing us learn alone, connected to a screen and only communicating for as long as is strictly necessary and without any real, emotional connection.
Like any fascism, neoliberalism also hates the group, our social and collective being, the civilization that matters for collective existence. “In 2018, more than half of EU countries already reported a marked shortage of teachers.”
The violence and sense of social breakdown we are witnessing in the West has a lot to do with this annihilation of the status of teachers.
It is impossible to live in a civilized society that values knowledge and wisdom and at the same time promotes neoliberalism, imperialism and hegemony. Its survival depends on the destruction of the public education system and its fundamental components: the class, the group, the school and the link that connects it all, the teacher.
It is therefore imperative for neoliberalism to “kill” the figure of the teacher in order to better dominate and reach the student.
This is what lies behind the destruction of public schools! In the end, it’s enough to present it as an unexpected consequence, to promise that it will change, and everything stays as it is – “democratically” immobile, in constant degradation until the end.
By destroying the teacher, the neoliberal West is destroying something even more important: our self-awareness!
Extreme individualism consists of the most absolute unconsciousness.
By Hugo Dionisio
Published by SCF
Republished by The 21st Century
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of 21cir.com