The teaching profession: between bankers and teachers

The teaching profession, or rather, teaching as a profession, is a practical field work and educational cultural, ethical and political, which has been building throughout history. It sees the teacher as a subject of knowledge in which bases its teaching practice, instruction and training in values.

This “intellectual field” consists of different schools of thought, problems of its own theories and methods, aims and contents, which are recognized as the specialized codes of an academic community.

It is recognized that from the 80′s, has begun and has established a true “flowering of educational research” in Colombia, through the Teaching Movement and a new education legislation which laid the foundation to support the exercise of the teaching profession in Pedagogy.

The impetus given by FECODE Teaching Movement in the eighties and nineties led to the development of educational theories of great conceptual and practical level. This teacher’s own knowledge, this ongoing reflection on the training process, this explicit knowledge about education, is the strength that gives identity to the teacher and relates to research, culture, sciences and knowledge.

It is also because they belong to the specialized field of knowledge and practice as the teacher understands social responsibility to education as a public cultural facilities. The teacher as a professional is also assumed to think politically as a citizen his duty to build a better country.

But this project educational, cultural and political that has been consolidated in Colombia for more than 15 years, is now thin and blurred by the look accounted for and efficiency of “bankers.”

Indeed, a look at the educational policies in Latin America point to a growing intrusion of the World Bank, IDB, ECLAC and UNDP.

From meetings Jontiem (1990) called “Education for All, the World Summit for Children held in New York (1990), the education initiative” Plan for Universal Access to Education “, held in Miami on the initiative of the United States in 1994 and the Agreement of Santiago de Chile, 1996, to the third summit in Quebec in 2001, obvious displacement of UNESCO as an international agency specializing in education: lead actor in the project principal in the early 80s, and subordinate minor player in the process of hemispheric summits in mid and late nineties. This is to counter the emergence of new actors leading the field of education to global and regional level, particularly the international banks, the World Bank and the IDB in this case.

International banks, concerned about the growing external debt of Latin American countries and alerted by the consequences that may have educational and cultural movements that are taking political power in the region, decided to make their credit policies and “support” compliance with covenants of fiscal consolidation, cut public spending and neoliberalism in their economies.

Urged a new relationship between State and education, which equate to the provision of public services such as water, electricity, roads or banks … and open to globalization, the competition of supply and demand, the society of knowledge and application of new communication technologies.

From multinational education, such as UNESCO and UNDP, are beginning to “rationalize” a speech about education as if it were a “commodity” whose quality depends on the cost-benefit, human capital, efficiency, effectiveness and business management.

Within sociotecnocratica logic, this discourse seeks to appropriate the idea of quality under the criteria and parameters that represent the overt commercialization of education and the pursuit of educational excellence elitist, segregating and discriminating. This discourse goes back on the quality of the field of economics concepts such as productivity, profitability, excellence, effectiveness, efficiency, optimization, indicators, assessment, accountability, control, etc., And urges rearrange the educational system through assessments from this approach, set criteria for accreditation, according to the teaching of business needs, monitor their business approach educational institutions … education as a commodity rather than as a cultural service.

Recipients are no longer citizens but customers and quality is now its new value exchange transaction between school and family. It emphasizes decentralization to circumvent the State’s responsibility is assumed teacher training as an unnecessary expense, it discredits the welfare state to move to a state of minimum and enhances the efficiency and quality of private education which is now an example to imitate.

The quality, a concept that has meaning and significance within the intellectual field of pedagogy, now loses its origin and is defined and limited, subordinate and disjointed against the hegemonic discourse and standardized since the government seeks to impose neoliberal approach.

Quality management as an indicator of successful entrepreneurship, efficiency because they do more with less investment, cut spending on the cultural value added in the ludicrous, the ethical and aesthetic look and counted on the spending per student, pay teachers, resources institutions … save the most is the watchword.

It discredits public education, costs are reported and points to teachers as wasteful and inefficient management, private education is privileged and mounted a device for evaluating education economist from this look.

Look economist who is accompanied by laws and decrees that aim to regulate the educational system for the sole purpose of adjusting their spending to the interests of global banking. Never mind that such laws and ordinances conflict with vested rights, democratic freedoms run over, ending up with social organizations and the rights of the Magisterium … the end justifies the means, and they join the mainstream press and the oligarchy to appear as legitimate, urgent and necessary a reform of education and teaching through evaluations of efficiency, minimum quality standards, basic skills, increase of students per teacher, integration of educational institutions and agreements with the private sector, to deny the possibility of education as enshrined in the Constitution: A citizen’s right, a public good social and cultural.

Is distorted the teaching profession that is now reduced to manage with efficiency, effectiveness and “quality” government guidelines, apart from teacher education and the intellectual field of education and pedagogy is “colonized” by the language of business , a language that is foreign and imposed. Policy against the Higher Normal Schools and Colleges, who now have to compete in their own field with professionals from all disciplines who come to teaching without foundation and without a vocation. How, then, we wonder, still speak of quality?

Faced with such nonsense is no alternative to strengthening the educational movement to base with their goals in teaching the work of teachers and qualified to confront critically the government policies, we can build together a cultural project scientific, educational and social abuse with dignity in front of the dictator.