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TO TEACH IS TO TRANSFORM
 

Statement of Congress of Teachers and Educators for Nationalism and Democracy- Alliance of Concerned Teachers (CONTEND-ACT) on World Teachers Day
 

October 5, 2011
 

The Congress of Teachers/Educators for Nationalism and Democracy joins the rest of the world in celebrating World Teachers Day as we up the ante of our struggle for rights and welfare as well as our noble efforts at defending the right to education.
 

The very recent and crucial resurgence of the teachers’ movement represents a major contribution not only to the education sector. It has also influenced and learned from the democratic and patriotic forces in Philippine society whose organized efforts at effecting genuine change in the country make our wager for education part and parcel of the people’s bid for national sovereignty and genuine democracy.
 

We have persistently challenged the anti-people and pro-imperialist policies inflicted by the past Macapagal-Arroyo and the current Aquino regimes with our demands for good governance and greater state subsidy for social services. We have forged a strong unity among teachers nationwide to join in the struggle of the basic sectors in society in order to strengthen our most urgent call for greater education budget.
 

Now, more than ever, our sector is empowered by the strength of the organized youth, farmers and workers encompassing all regions of the country. We underscore this unity because imperialist globalization continues to mask itself as a process of democratization that offers boundless possibilities for the so-called renewal of education in order to meet “global demands.”
 

We strongly reject prescriptions that are poised to market our students as either globally competitive professionals or manual labourers both in the service of the “global village” that knows only one rule: the accumulation of profit at the expense of turning people into commodities to be bought or sold at the cheapest price that management dictates.
 

Our struggle for a nationalist education is an alternative to the current form of education that only serves foreign interests at the expense of economic, social and cultural development. Our bid for a scientific education is aimed precisely at challenging all mystifications created by and for the ruling class whose narrow interests are raised to the level of the state's national agenda through their positions in the different branches of government and the filtering of mainstream media. Our fight for a mass oriented education is an alternative to an educational system that is exclusionary because commercialized. A national, scientific and mass education is our response to a pedagogy that is predominantly fascist on account of an institution that is shaped by imperialist interests that necessitate the repression of knowledge and practice that serve the interests of the basic sectors who comprise the majority.
 

We, in CONTEND, recognize that our struggle for the future of education must also immediately bear fruit for our hardworking teachers. Our struggle for free education is not only a guiding principle but one that comes with a blueprint of concrete action that can only strengthen and empower our sector and its alliance with the broader movement for social transformation. Today, on World Teachers Day 2011, we, together with the Alliance of Concerned Teachers, therefore commit ourselves to push for the following demands for greater education budget:
 

1. Regularization of all Volunteer /Contractual Teachers!
2. 104,000 New Permanent Teacher Items!
3. Salary Grade 15 for Teacher 1! Salary Grade 16 for Instructor 1 in the State Colleges and Universities! P6,000 Increase in Base Pay of non-teaching personnel!
4. Increase Chalk Allowance to P2,000!
5. Increase Base Productivity Pay to P5,000!
6. Increase Clothing Allowance to P6,000
7. P91.5 Billion for Classroom Shortage & Other School Facilities!
8. Adequate Budget for Universal Kindergarten program!
9. Greater State Subsidy for PNU (Philippine Normal University) and All SUCs (State Universities & Colleges)!
10. 100% Increase in MOOE in All Levels of Education!
It is only by addressing the concrete needs of our sector that we as teachers can make education ever more relevant and fruitful for our students and for the perpetual learners that we are. On World Teachers Day, we renew our commitment to contribute and to learn from the global imperialist struggle as well as from the particular struggles that we wage in every school where we educate in order to transform and be transformed.
 

A Happy and Militant World Teachers’ Day!

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PANDAYAN, official newsletter of All UP Workers Alliance
 

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STATEMENT ON WORLD TEACHERS DAY
 

COMMISSION ON CONCERN 11: RIGHTS OF TEACHERS, RESEARCHERS AND OTHER EDUCATION PERSONNEL AND THE STRUGGLE AGAINST IDEAS AND RESEARCHES DIRECTED AGAINST THE PEOPLE
 

INTERNATIONAL LEAGUE OF PEOPLES STRUGGLES (ILPS)
October 5, 2011

The Commission on Concern No. 11 “Rights of Teachers, Researchers and Other Education Personnel and the struggle Against Ideas and Research Directed against the People,” of the International League of Peoples Struggles (ILPS) greets our colleagues in the education sector on the occasion of World Teachers Day this October 5, 2011.

October 5 was proclaimed as World Teachers Day by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1994 to commemorate the 1966 adoption of UNESCO and the International Labor Organization (ILO) joint Recommendation Concerning the Status of Teachers and later on expanded to include the 1997 UNESCO Recommendations Concerning the Status of Higher

Education Teaching Personnel.
 

The two recommendations focused on the responsibilities and rights of teachers and highlighted the important role teachers (both in basic and tertiary levels) perform in educating the youth and in creating professionals and skilled personnel necessary for society’s development.
 

Under the conditions of global crisis brought to the fore by the widespread protests in all parts of the world and the current “Occupy Wall Street” right in the heart of the United States, the commemoration of World Teachers Day takes on a more militant analysis and forms. Clearly the attacks on teachers’ gains in our struggles for higher salaries, job security, for our right to form unions and the right to freedom of assembly cannot be separated from the over-all attacks of imperialism on the world’s peoples.
 

It is in the spirit of joining our voices with those of other education colleagues, with the youth and students and the masses of workers and peasants all over the world standing up against imperialism that the ILPS Commission on Concern 11, reissues the main points of the analysis approved by the ILPS Fourth International Assembly held last July 8-9, 2011 in the Philippines.
 

The Current Context: Education and Imperialism
 

The global capitalist system is structured by the hierarchic relations of nation-states currently dominated by the US imperialist state. As as a mode of crisis management, neoliberalism has been controlled and operated mainly by the US-led ruling elites in imperialist nations and their allied elites in the neocolonies through their hold on key social institutions.
 

While labor production remains the principal site for capitalist exploitation, educational apparatus serves as the most potent ideological apparatus for the reproduction of neoliberal policies and ethos. It has become one of the principal contested sites where various social forces aiming at solving the problem of overproduction and providing legitimacy to the crisis-ridden global finance capitalism.
The new mode of structural adjustment program (SAP) resurrects the much maligned active state intervention only to enable the market to recover and create an environment in which monopoly capitalists can extract more surpluses and solve the crisis of overproduction through wars of aggression.
 

Private-Public Partnership takes on the form of outsourcing of educational services, outsourcing of non-educational support services, research partnership of public universities and industries, and promoting commercialization of public research. PPPs also take the form of the government subsidizing private schools through the system of vouchers.
 

So while early SAP dictated by the IMF/WB encouraged total state abandonment of education, the recent phase of neoliberal capitalism in the face of pervasive crisis has accelerated the state’s role in promoting the reign of the free market.
 

The Continuing Assault on Rights and Welfare of Education Workers
 

All over the world, the need for teachers is increasing, particularly in developing countries. Based on new UNESCO Institute for Statistics projections, 99 countries will need at least 1.9 million more teachers by 2015. More than one-half of them are needed in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite this, however, more and more teachers are facing unemployment in their countries.
 

Hundreds of newly qualified teachers in Ireland are without regular work. School opens in September and there are only 700 job openings in primary schools.
 

According to reports from Canada, many Canadians with degrees in education are forced to find work abroad because they cannot find work at home. Universities in Canada are training teachers with education and English degrees to work in English-as-a-second-language (ESL) schools in Japan, Korea, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Furthermore, many Canadian university administrations support Israel’s Zionist policy and Canadian mining firms abroad wreaking havoc on the environment, on ancestral domains of indigenous peoples.
 

In the United States, charter schools, a particular form of public private partnership in education is proliferating as public schools are gradually being phased out. Attacks on teachers and staff unions and their right to collective bargaining are intensifying. Retrenchment of thousands of teachers in New York is being implemented in spite of a large budget surplus of the state.
 

In Germany, unions and employers failed to reach an agreement for some 600,000 workers across the nation. Temporary teachers are getting the short end of the stick as they receive less than their regular counterparts. In negotiations, teachers unions call for salary increases of at least five percent and for union wage for teachers employed on a temporary capacity.
 

In England, many teachers and other public sector workers who serve some of the most vulnerable people (people with disabilities, alcohol problems, asylum seekers and youth with drug addiction problems) have been laid off. Teachers unions, in the meantime, are gearing for strikes against redundancies, the removal of pension rights and a pay freeze which will slash 12 percent of salaries of working teachers, and 20 percent from pensions of retired teachers.
 

In South Korea, a national security law threatens the open formation of anti-imperialist and militant teacher’s organizations and corruption pervades educational institutions.
 

In Indonesia, contractualization of teachers is rampant and those hired received salaries as low as US$50 a month.
 

In the Philippines, the Department of Education has made contractualization and hiring of volunteer teachers as a policy solution to the diminishing state’s subsidy to education. Public universities and colleges have had their budgets slashed and are compelled and encouraged by the state to compensate for the shortfall through higher tuition and other student fees, increased contractualization of teaching and support staff, and dependence on corporate investments. Furthermore, heightened militarization of schools and universities take on various forms from actual occupation by soldiers of school campuses, to soldiers enrolling as students to do intelligence work and to military conducted seminars in schools red-tagging teachers’, students’ and other progressive organizations.
 

By tailoring the educational curriculum to the imperative of neoliberal ideology, new courses and departments have been created and developed with the sole purpose of catering to market demands. Thereby reducing education to a private good devoid of any public content.
 

With the academe subjected to commodified social relations, educational workers are predisposed to fragmentary thinking exemplified in the popularity of postmodernism. Detached from the basic sectors of society academic workers are seduced into reactionary politics that rejects totality, does away with grand narrative, questioning the centrality of class and economy, the reduction of politics to discourse, and the wanton randomization of history.
 

A Bright Future
 

The contradictions of capitalism bread resistance from the exploited classes of society. Teachers and other education personnel globally have stood arm-in-arm with the students, workers, farmers, other professionals and individuals in asserting that education is a right and in defending the rights and welfare of education workers and the people. While mainstream education is used to promote, defend and expand dominant/imperialist interest, progressive organizations and unions of education personnel, together with militant student organizations have continued to assert, inside and outside the classrooms and in theory and in practice the liberating role of education that is in the service of the marginalized and the oppressed.
 

Last April, hundreds of teachers in California and New York held protests demanding that state officials extend tax hikes to make up budget cuts against public education. The teachers said that higher levels of funding for public schools are necessary.
 

In Michigan, teachers and their supporters are also up against budget cuts which would translate in $300 fewer provisions for every student in the state.
 

In Los Angeles, teachers unions are against privatization. In Wisconsin, Indianapolis and Washington State, teachers are fighting tooth and nail to defend their collective bargaining rights even as they demand higher state subsidies for public education.
 

In April, massive protests led by teachers and other state workers were held all over Easter Germany. Demonstrators called for better working conditions and improved job contracts for new and trainee teachers.
 

In the Philippines, the educational sector has forged solidarity among its ranks by decisively participating in the parliamentary struggle that will push for the rights and welfare of academic workers and students nationwide. ACT Teachers Partylist won a seat in Congress in the last 2010 elections and has since its founding in 2009 worked with teachers, education support staff and the basic sectors (comprising of workers and peasants) to advance the anti-imperialist and democratic struggles of the people.
 

Teachers and other education worker’s organizations forge solidarity with anti-imperialist youth, farmers, workers, women organizations to strengthen their own anti-imperialist and democratic objectives. In turn, the support of the education workers to the struggles of the basic sectors provide much needed broadening of public support for their demands, such as land reform and demand higher wages.
 

The attack on education can only be defeated if education workers come together as anti-imperialist force to address the root cause of the education crisis. Addressing the root cause of the education crisis compels us to link up with the broader national and global alliance against imperialism. Only then can we succeed in our vision of making education serve the world’s peoples!
 

OUR COMMITMENT AND OUR PLANS
 

It is in this context of the worsening global crisis brought about by imperialism, the intensifying attack on education as a right and as a public service on the one hand and the resurgence of collective actions of education workers and students around the world on the other that Workshop on Concern 11 reaffirms our commitment to advancing education workers rights and welfare and struggle against imperialism and puts forward our plans for the next three years.
.We hereby reaffirm our commitment to:
 

1. Fight for the basic rights as workers in education (in their home countries or as migrant education workers), which include full salaries and benefits, security of tenure, the right to professional growth, and academic freedom.
 

2. Organize teachers, researchers and other education personnel in their home country or abroad and launch popular campaigns and struggles against imperialist policies, particularly those that pertain to education.
 

3. Demand an increase in access to education, to public spending for education in particular and for social services in general which is most often sacrificed in favor of debt servicing and military spending. Oppose corporate control and education. Put an end to state violence and repression.
 

4. Establish and strengthen solidarity ties among the many education workers' organizations worldwide based on a common anti-imperialist stand.
 

5. Encourage and support pro-people critical thinking, action-based learning and anti-imperialist activism among our students at all levels.
 

6. Undertake simultaneous activities on October 5, World Teachers Day and ensure the participation of teachers, researchers, and other education personnel in anti-imperialist activities in our respective countries on May Day and March 8, International Women's Day.
 

7. Support the anti-imperialist struggles of peasants, workers, migrants, women, youth, indigenous peoples and other oppressed sectors.
 

Teachers of the world unite! Oppose neo-liberal policies and programs!
 

Defend public education and social services for the people!
 

Strengthen the people’s anti-imperialist ranks!