Letters: COVID, Racism and US Schools

Re-Opening the Schools—For Whom?

Schools in Los Angeles, like a lot of the US, have been closed for a year due to COVID-19. Parents, teachers, and students are fed up with the situation. So are the bosses and their politicians. But they’re fed up for different reasons.

Parents, teachers and students have been forced to be socially isolated and to adapt to an overwhelming new technology. Mothers in particular have had to juggle work and helping their children in online teaching. There has been an alarming decline in learning, coupled with the rampant stress that comes with it all.

The bosses and their politicians worry about other things: production, profit loss, and being re-elected. They worry that parents, teachers, and students will completely lose faith in the system.

“The danger exists for the bosses that we are all collectively surviving, that the capitalist system is not necessary, and we are reinventing ourselves,” said a comrade. They worry that we can do without the schools, in themselves pillars to maintain capitalism.

The Governor is offering billions for schools to reopen, especially for the youngest children up to age eight. The Los Angeles School Superintendent and the president of the teachers’ union have announced a tentative deal that will have young children back in school for half a day by mid-April, and older students doing online instruction in school by early May.

Teachers have already voted by 91% not to go back inside the schools until all teachers can be vaccinated, the county-wide level of infections is reduced and schools are properly equipped and made completely safe to avoid infections. The union leadership is saying that these conditions have been met, and teachers will probably vote to approve the agreement.

But why should we trust them? In Los Angeles County, extreme racism and overcrowded housing have already resulted in devastating rates of infection and death.

Many schools lack adequate ventilation; in many cases it is non-existent. “They want to kill us. This opening will increase infections,” said another comrade. This young Black mother knows that the capitalists don’t value workers’ lives.

Another comrade replied, “It is true they want to kill us and they are killing us. But they can’t kill us all. The US Army is made up of working-class young people, and the rulers need their loyalty to fight against rivals like China or Russia.”

The bosses have a contradiction. Their economy is in trouble and they want workers back in the labs, the factories, the stores and the restaurants. The politicians are in trouble—the governor of California is up for recall.

The bosses want to open the schools to boost their economy. They only care about workers and their children whom they need for their profits and wars. They will kill us with their pandemic, with their armed police or in the fields of war.

Mobilizing the masses for communism is necessary now. It will ultimately lead us to communist revolution. In communism, we can live in a world in which all life is valued to the maximum.

Comrade teachers in California (USA)

Workers’ Kids Need Communist Education, Not Capitalist Schools

“I’m worried about the kids in the Chicago Public Schools,” said a close friend. “My daughter’s school in our well-off suburb is open and doing fine. But the Chicago Teachers’ Union is fighting against reopening the city schools.

“My mother was a Chicago teacher,” she continued, “and I have walked picket lines with her. But I went to those schools and I didn’t learn anything. Those children are already so far behind. My high school friend who was voted ‘most likely to succeed’ went away to university. He dropped out after a year because he had never learned to study.”

“That’s a contradiction,” I said. “You say that the kids don’t learn anything in school but yet you are worried that the schools aren’t open. Would you or your friend have been worse off if you’d missed a year of high school?”

She saw my point and agreed that it was a contradiction. She also saw that her daughter’s nice new school is very different from the run-down, chronically underfunded Chicago Public Schools.

Only communist revolution can resolve contradictions like this.

Whether capitalist schools are “in-person” or “remote,” they don’t serve the working class and our children. For some, success in school can pave the way to an easier, better-paid or less alienated job. For a very few, it is a path to becoming an exploiter rather than exploited.

But there is no way to reform capitalist schools to make them serve the masses. Systems of education exist to reproduce existing social relations of production.

Communist education will not be an “improved” version of capitalist schooling. Even young children will do real, useful, age-appropriate work. Learning new things will be part of everyone’s lifelong work.

Communist education includes new technical skills and a deeper understanding of how to strengthen communist social relations. And many other things that will satisfy our curiosity about the natural world and our desire to make and appreciate beautiful and wonderful things.

Sometimes our usual social arrangements may be disrupted because of war, pandemic, extreme weather, or other events. We have seen, in the pandemic, that those with money can make alternative arrangements for themselves. In communism, we’ll make alternative arrangements for everyone.

Many of us, and our friends, are struggling with the school-reopening question. Let’s reframe the discussion as “capitalist schooling or communist education?”

Former Chicago Teacher

Read our pamphlet: Communist Education for a Classless Society

available here

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