Teachers, Students, Workers Must Build Class Consciousness
Puerto Rico: High School Students Strike Against Transfer of Popular Teacher
HUMACAO, PUERTO RICO, November 11—Last May, this educational region made a physical education teacher “redundant,” appointing another teacher to a high school where two teachers already filled the slots for that subject. At the end of the term, authorities moved one of them to another school, violating regulations and disrespecting his seniority.
His absence had an immediate effect on the campus. Students questioned why the teacher was transferred. He had been at the school for four years and coached the women’s volleyball team. He had established a close relationship of trust and affection with the students.
They decided to strike on October 13, in front of their school, to demand that the unjustly transferred teacher be returned. They also demanded that the administration clarify the status of the other physical education teacher, whose job could be in danger because of this illegal appointment.
The strike took the school administration by surprise. They didn’t expect their students to dare to carry out this kind of organization. It paralyzed work on campus and caught the attention of the educational region, whose administrators agreed to meet with the affected teachers.
The regional director accepted that they did something illegal and premeditated. She agreed to find solutions and asked for time to study the case.
The students decided to strike again on October 20 because their grievances had not been addressed. Then the school administration began what was expected: intimidation and repressive tactics against the students involved. They identified participants and threatened them with suspension and elimination of activities. They lied about students, antagonizing them with false statements about what happened in the agreements and how the fellow teacher was transferred.
Many other teachers, intimidated by the school administration, punished the students who participated in the strike. Teachers denied them make-up exams or assignments that carry points or grades.
This immediately put the brakes on the energy of the struggle. Young people with little experience of political activism didn’t realize or understand that they really are the school. They are the majority sector in the school community and the axis of the educational system in general.
These students are the future workers of society. As part of their learning in the educational system they should be taught to fight for justice. But we see the opposite. Critical thinking is not stimulated and the struggle for social justice is repressed.
Certainly, here we can see how the capitalist system and its education do not take students seriously, or even recognize their importance and the great contribution they can offer in the educational process. One such contribution is class consciousness: understanding to which class we belong.
This is something that capitalist education tries to destroy. Still, the students demonstrated by example the path of struggle workers must take to ensure the seizure of power.
In this situation, instead of the teachers fighting together against injustice, against attacks on job stability, and for better conditions, the system pushed them into fighting among themselves on purpose to divide and conquer. Only unity between teachers, students, parents, and other school workers will achieve the qualitative change that we expect in the educational system and in our society.
It is precisely this class consciousness that teachers must take, understand, and teach. But unfortunately, it is one of the sectors that least identifies with the workers’ movement. The objective of communist organizations and communist activists should be to carry that message to the working masses. They must know what class they belong to, identify with their class, and forge its unity. In this way, they will be able to overthrow capitalists from political power and make it their own.
Once teachers identify with their class, they have the responsibility to forge unity with their students from that class perspective so that the struggle for freedom and the destruction of capitalist exploitation is consistent and successful.
Meanwhile, the students of Humacao are still waiting for answers to their demands. They are ready to defend workers’ rights and demand the excellent teachers they deserve. They are giving lessons to their other teachers, setting an example of solidarity with just causes; that’s the reason for their struggle.
—Communist Workers and Students for Social Change
Read our pamphlet:
“Communist Education for a Classless Society”
here
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