Need for communist education here ♦ Who will control education? here ♦
We Stand with Teachers Who Want to Strike for Safety: Justification for Reopening Schools Exposes Need for Communist Education
Seattle, USA Teachers’ Strike, 2015
SEATTLE, USA, January 3—When they heard about the state’s relaxed guidelines and the Seattle district’s desire to prematurely open schools, my fellow teachers were ready to strike. Safety is crucial, but are there even bigger issues at stake?
Across the U.S., school districts, bowing to the will of the capitalists, are forcing the re-opening of physical classrooms. For example, a comrade’s niece is a counselor at an East Coast elementary school. Finances force her to go back to in-person counseling. She has three children still in school and has to consider their safety. This dilemma affects the grandparents as well. Although thus far most kids don’t seem to get very sick, bringing them together in an enclosed classroom increases the potential for spreading the virus throughout the community.
The pandemic has laid bare the role of schools in enabling workers to produce profits for the capitalists. The ruling class wants people back to work and they want schools open as warehouses for students, regardless of the suffering that causes.
Capitalist society, focused on the maximization of profit, has allowed 1.8 million confirmed deaths worldwide. There are over 350,000 deaths in the U.S. alone. Schools expose the failings of capitalism in non-pandemic times; they amplify them during the pandemic.
The ruling class is working hard to turn public opinion against teachers and school staff. Rather than being painted as the heroes they were in the spring, they are now being called entitled and selfish for demanding safe working and learning conditions. There are cries of “learning loss” and “students falling behind.” Educators know these attacks well. But they ring hollow after years of schools being defunded and any attempts to make education robust and meaningful for students being undermined.
Capitalist Schools Reinforce Class, Gender and Race Inequality
Schools are painted as the “great equalizers,” the road to opportunity for all students. But under capitalism, they function as a social sorting mechanism. Over the course of 12-16 years or more, they reproduce and justify the reproduction of class, gender and race inequality. They reproduce racism and sexism through the curriculum. They justify inequalities using test scores and grades, ranking students according to their perceived potential to produce capitalist profits.
In the US, the real wages of workers have been stagnant for 40 years, but Wall Street profits have created 56 new billionaires since the beginning of the pandemic. Schools reproduce and justify those inequalities.
Parents who have to work are looking for some relief. There is an extra burden placed on them during the pandemic. This has an especially large, negative impact on women, and single mothers in particular. This sexist attack further exposes the failings of capitalism.
Communist Education Is the Real Equalizer; Promotes Collective Well-being
In a communist society, education will be focused on developing each student to contribute to the collective well-being, to reproduce equality and unity. A crisis like this would be an opportunity to learn more about science and public health. Society would be focused on mobilizing people as quickly and safely as possible to end the pandemic, thinking collectively about how to effectively protect lives.
We stand with the teachers who want to strike for the safety of their fellow instructors, staff students and their families. But capitalism can’t provide safety. So what should we strike for? We should strike to add our voices to the mobilization for communism.
Let’s prepare for this kind of political strike by widely circulating this Red Flag article. We can follow up by discussing the article’s communist ideas with our fellow teachers, staff and students. Coast to coast and around the world, let’s build a revolutionary movement for communist education.
Who Will Control Education: The Biggest Bosses or the Working Class?
SEATTLE, USA, January 3—About a month ago, the Democratic governor of Washington State announced his relaxed guidelines for reopening the schools. In fact, these were shaped in secret by a think-tank called “Challenge Seattle.” These relaxed guidelines will prematurely force students, staff and teachers back into the classrooms.
Challenge Seattle is made up of 19 of the top bosses in the state. They include the CEOs of Boeing, Amazon, Microsoft, Costco, Starbucks, Nordstrom and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Also included are the Washington Kaiser Permanente Medical Group and Pacific Northwest JP Morgan Chase, subsidiaries of the country’s biggest medical group and bank.
Almost all workers know the capitalists constantly plot to maximize their profits. Businesses are always looking for more ways to exploit us.
But it goes further than just business. The wage system is the material basis for all capitalist society. In times of crisis, the biggest bosses take direct control of every aspect of the social order.
In this case, Challenge Seattle took direct control of education. That’s the true nature of capitalist democracy.
In a communist society, education will both serve the collective needs of the masses and directly involve the working class. During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, communist plantation workers criticized the old schools as being divorced from proletarian politics, from workers and peasants, from labor and reality. At a party meeting, a veteran Seattle teacher described how middle-school students could learn much more about writing, speaking, history, math and science with the help of local factory workers.
The pandemic has shown the absolute need for the working class to take direct control of education and everything else away from the capitalists. Join the ICWP to build for the communist revolution that will make that possible.
Read our pamphlet:
Communist Education for a Classless Society
Available here