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EDUCATION: Teachers of the World – United and Underpaid

Mario Osava

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil, Jul 26 2004 (IPS) - Education is facing a paradox today: students are not learning, despite the enormous accumulation of educational theories and the technology available to many schools and teachers.

That view, expressed by Juçara Dutra Vieira, president of Brazil’s National Confederation of Education Workers (CNTE), referred to her country, but also to a reality shared by many other countries, even in the industrialised North.

The problems facing teachers and education were debated Jul. 22-26 at Education International’s (EI) Fourth World Congress, in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre.

Quality public education, improving the conditions of work and terms of employment of teachers, combating all forms of racism and discrimination in education and society, and promoting democracy are the main objectives of EI, a global trade union organisation of education personnel, whose 29 million members represent all sectors of education from pre-school to university, in more than 300 national trade unions in 162 countries and territories.

EI emerged when the World Confederation of Organisations of the Teaching Profession (WCOTP) and the International Federation of Free Teachers’ Unions (IFFTU) merged in 1993. The incorporation of the World Confederation of Teachers (WCT), which is strong in central and eastern Europe, is now being negotiated.

The unification occurred in response to changes around the world in the past few decades, like the break-up of the Soviet Union and east European socialist bloc in the early 1990s, and especially the trend towards ”commercialisation and privatisation” that is threatening educational systems worldwide.

The focus on profits in education could be aggravated by the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), Marta Maffei, president of the Confederation of Education Workers of the Republic of Argentina (CTERA), told IPS.

There are a total of around 60 million teachers worldwide, but over the next decade there will be a shortage of between 15 and 35 million, due to growing demand in developing countries, and to retirement and burnout in industrialised nations, said EI secretary-general Fred van Leeuwen.

At the five-day meeting, which brought together more than 1,400 teachers, a generalised complaint voiced was the deterioration of the profession. While low salaries and poor working conditions are bigger problems in developing nations, violence in the schools and work overload are challenges all over the world.

The origins of many of the current problems in Latin America date back to the military dictatorships that governed many countries in the region in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, which reduced the role of the state in many areas, including education, said Maffei.

One legacy of the era of de facto military regimes is the foreign debt, which is repaid ”by sacrificing education” and through an expansion of poverty, said the Argentine parliamentarian, who is a member of the centre-left Alliance for a Republic of Equals.

In Argentina, the income of the wealthiest 10 percent of the population went from 12 times that of the poorest 10 percent in 1975 to a ratio of 31:1 in 1990 and 50:1 this year.

Argentina is also a graphic illustration of how education has gone downhill while the number of poor children has multiplied. The country’s enviable public education system has deteriorated to the point where many children in public schools end up flunking or dropping out.

As ”neo-liberal” free-market economic policies have been embraced in the region, the social fabric has been weakened, and public schools have become key components of the social support network, due to the need to provide assistance to malnourished children from broken-down families, which has converted schools into ”public multi-use institutions,” said Maffei.

One of the tasks now is to ”restore the function of schools: teaching,” she underlined.

Contributing to the fight against HIV/AIDS is one of the priorities of the new president of EI, South African Thembelani Thulas Nxesi, who was elected at the Fourth World Congress to succeed Mary Hatwood Futrell, from the United States.

Thulas Nxesi, secretary-general of the South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU) since 1994, said other priorities would be to increase the number of teachers organised in trade unions, especially by providing assistance to unions that suffer repression; to maintain or improve the working conditions of teachers; and to promote quality public education for all.

The election of the new secretary-general ”will be good for developing countries because it will bring a new sensitivity as well as the sense of urgency shared by the developing South, where educational systems suffer the worst problems,” said Vieira.

With the EI secretariat based in Brussels and a president from a rich nation, the organisation is a bit removed from the developing world, which accounts for two-thirds of the world’s teachers, said the head of the CNTE.

”Re-thinking education” to ”teach students how to learn, and to reason,” instead of simply absorbing information, is one of the main concerns of Vieira, who has been involved in the labour movement for 17 years.

In Brazil, half of all teachers have no access to computers, and many schools that do have computers use them for administrative purposes rather than teaching, she lamented.

But everything depends on the funding available. Public spending per student in Brazil is only half of what governments pledged in the 1990s, and teachers’ salaries have plunged, said Vieira.

Progress seen in ”universalising” primary school education have come ”at the cost of wages and the quality of teaching,” she added.