Breathe
By Nurit Martínez
The list of issues that exist on the second floor of the Fourth Transformation in the case of basic education is long. The agenda is not precise in terms of education and, on the other hand, it is full of pending issues in the administrative area, infrastructure, attention to educational backwardness and a clear proposal of what the New Mexican School means regarding the vision of the Nation, historical interpretation and, particularly, union democratization: what do we do with the SNTE and the CNTE or will there really be a transition to new scenarios of union democracy?
So far, in the route marked by President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo and her Secretary of Public Education, Mario Delgado, there is no clarity of anything and a discourse that tries to convince that something new is coming.
The discourse on education, as we have seen during the last six years, has been full of good wishes, high expectations and, above all, with a high ideological load poorly applied. I wish we had had the opportunity to have an interpretation of our modern history. It would have been instructive in many ways, to have the interpretation of the left of many of the events in our country, but it was only enough for a person from the area of Educational Materials to prescribe us his highest aspirations of electoral manipulation.
The creation of free textbooks remains a pending task. Mexico does not need to manipulate its future; it needs to recreate its history with the certainty and recognition that it is full of victims and victimizers. That vision helps much more than the attempted political-electoral manipulation for the coming years.
If that is Morena's vision, there are many additional spaces where it can be created. It is better to create citizens aware of the atrocities committed in the past, critical individuals with clear reasoning to make decisions, than to create bastions of zombies wanting to vote for Morena with their eyes closed. Do they not trust their own social and economic policies?
There is a clear task, and he or she or the successor of Marx Arriaga are central to this strategic position in the president's administration. The country does not have to invent profiles; specialists are sprouting in multiple institutions, it is only necessary to choose the most suitable ones.
If the focus of the educational task in the coming years is infrastructure, there is no resource that will be enough, especially if it is observed that hundreds or thousands of schools are located in risk areas. So far, no one who has been in charge of this responsibility of construction, maintenance and remodeling has been able to find the necessary measures to address these three scenarios in the same way. Even more so if in front of this decision there are thousands of schools that require basic infrastructure: water, toilets, roofs, floors, walls, blackboards, chairs or benches so that the educational miracle can take place.
The profile of this assignment is administrative and technical, but above all political, because without a clear, open, transparent and committed dialogue between municipal presidents, mayors, legislators at all levels, governors and secretaries of state, parents and businessmen, this is not possible.
On the administrative side, the basic education organization chart is immersed in multiple management and administrative processes that consume a lot of time in bureaucratic procedures, thousands of them that could be eliminated if everyone does the task that corresponds to him or her.
In the private sector, these school management, evaluation or certification procedures not only cause this delay in activities, but also represent a high cost and even open up possibilities for negotiation with a lack of transparency and abundant corruption.
President Sheinbaum and Secretary Delgado have indicated, after the election, that meeting the demand of union organizations to end the unit in charge of assigning positions and promoting positions in basic education will have a new direction.
So far, they have not said which will be the new body or instance that will guarantee transparency and certainty in the allocation of labor positions free of any corruption. For this job, the profile should be very technical, with a deep knowledge of the ins and outs of the negotiations that the National Union of Education Workers and the National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers carry out in the darkest of places.
Both organizations have learned over dozens of years that economic and political bargaining can take precedence over education. The last thing they have cared about are the children in the schools and even less if there are tens or hundreds of thousands of well-prepared teachers over those recommended, people who, without a profile, are willing to inherit a position or who, without the necessary studies, seek a job, whatever it may be, but a job nonetheless.
Let alone if they have suitable profiles and, I insist, if their psychological or pathological profiles do not lead them to those places to find how to satisfy desires of sexual harassment and abuse. So crude, but so true; that is why it has not been possible to eradicate these cruel crimes in basic education schools.
To conclude with this pending and unclear agenda, there is the whole spectrum related to union democratization. The labor reform has not been able to give clarity to this union spectrum, that teachers have the possibility to elect their leaders, join the organization that best suits them without jeopardizing their labor rights and stability. As long as the idea prevails that the two union organizations are an electoral engine, the rights of union democracy will continue to be an aspiration among classroom teachers.
The agenda can be extended even further, but in the face of the questions and the unfolding of the issues, it is required that the authority has clarity on what it is looking for; otherwise, the second floor of the Fourth Transformation will continue along the route of kicked boat management: kicking to find and then kicking again the pending issues for the future.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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