LOS ANGELES, September 9—”Every week, teachers as well as students take the Covid test at my school,” said a high school teacher. “Last Tuesday morning I took the test, but I didn’t get the positive result until Thursday.”
Although this teacher was vaccinated, he contracted Covid and endangered his students, co-workers, family members and others with whom he was in contact during the first week of school. After eight days without symptoms and a negative test, he went back to work. The government and the entire system of capitalism is responsible for all of this mess!
The accelerated push to open schools after a long virtual school year has been irresponsible and chaotic. Parents have sent their children to schools with great fear that their children will contract Covid.
During the first week of school in Los Angeles, 6500 students had to miss one or more days due to coronavirus. Nearly a thousand school workers missed at least one day from work due to sickness or exposure to an infected person.
In a conversation between another comrade and her friend at a barbecue last week the comrade said, “They want to open the schools so parents will go back to work. The capitalists can’t make profits off people sitting at home with their kids on Zoom.”
Her friend, a preschool teacher, responded: “The public schools were invented to do what the capitalists needed in the first place. In the US it was to teach farmers’ children the discipline to be factory workers. I want to facilitate the development of children as whole, healthy, creative human beings. It’s a conflict I feel every day, working in an institution that wasn’t set up for that.”
Capitalism needs a school system that trains and indoctrinates young people. It also needs a workforce to produce and distribute goods for the capitalists’ profit.
Covid and the pandemic have threatened all that. Reopening the economy has been the urgent priority for the U.S. government and especially the Democratic Party. Reopening the schools was part of forcing parents—especially mothers—back to work.
Parents who had been able to stay home were forced to return to work after vaccines became available in different ways: (1) Federal financial assistance for unemployed workers ended. (2) Rental assistance ended. (3) Housing evictions (prohibited during the first part of the pandemic) are now allowed.
In the US, mothers are an integral part of the paid workforce. Many US families are made up of single mothers or just a couple and their children. Most families don’t have childcare unless the elementary schools are open. The capitalists are saying, “The schools are open, now you go to work!”
This is not true everywhere. In El Salvador, for example, there is more often an extended family network that supervises children who stay at home and do school remotely. So, the government was able open the economy before they opened the schools.
But one thing is universal in capitalism. Every school in every country is an institution that does what the capitalists and their government needs done. And schools in every country are arenas for struggle to mobilize the masses for communism.
The teacher who tested positive is back in the classroom. He and the ICWP schools collective in Los Angeles are distributing Red Flag and talking to students, parents and guardians, teachers and other school workers to make that potential a reality. Students, soldiers and workers with communist ideas can be part of the revolutionary force that can overthrow capitalism and build the communist world we need.
The virus is a product of the unsafe world economy in which human need is totally subordinated to the capitalist demand for profit. We fight for communism, where all production will be in the hands of the masses. The masses will eliminate money and markets and produce what they need—not for the profit of some boss.
So, communism will be able to prioritize safety and health and eliminate or minimize deadly viruses. And the distribution of these goods will be guided by the principle of need and not by who can buy it.
Education in communist society will be to reproduce the communist system, not the capitalist system. Its goal will be the development of children as whole, healthy, creative human beings in a world free of exploitation. Older workers and young people will work and study side by side to build that new world where we receive everything possible to live a full and healthy life.
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To read more about our analysis of capitalist education and how education can serve the interests of the working-class masses, read our pamphlet
COMMUNIST EDUCATION FOR A CLASSLESS SOCIETY
available here