Walking through the main square of Oaxaca City, Mexico, it is impossible not to feel the restless energy. Makeshift barricades and rocks litter the streets. Local residents wearing bandanas to conceal their identities form roadblocks, slowing traffic and demanding tourists show their passports. The radical political groups have stalls mingled with street vendors, and banners with revolutionary slogans are hung every ten meters. Since mid-June, there have been no police in the city, expelled with considerable force by… teachers?

In May of this year, tens of thousands of teachers in the state of Oaxaca formed a tent city in the state capital’s main square in order to force the local governor to spend more money on rural education and increased wages for all workers (including themselves), not political campaigning. The public response was divided; many were annoyed that their children were not going to school, but many saw it as a direct attack on a blatantly corrupt government. Governor Ruiz Ortiz, increasingly conscious of the upcoming election, refused to negotiate and attempted to force the teachers back to work. At 3 a.m. on June 14, a police helicopter flew low over the city and dropped tear gas among the tents of thousands of sleeping teachers and their families. What followed was a savage police riot, with hundreds of teachers wounded by truncheons and tear gas.

Over the next days, however, the governor experienced a massive reversal of political fortune when an outpouring of popular support drove the police out of the city. The public rallied behind the teachers, who had fought back against the police and had retaken the main square. Within two days, there were marches of 400, 000 people from all over the state, showing their outrage at the attack and supporting the teachers’ demands. Support for the governor’s party plummeted with the progressive party moving into the lead. The teachers’ union and other groups went on to form the ‘Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca’, which declared itself the provisional government.

Now as a thought experiment: try to picture Queen’s Park being overtaken for months with thousands of teachers, with tens of thousands of parents and community members supporting their demands. Perhaps we would be pitching rocks at the police, or your school’s Kindergarten teacher mixing Molotov Cocktails. Then imagine a giant meeting where we declare ourselves to be the government and proceed to barricade University Avenue. Fortunately for us, this is one experience that we will be forced to forego; we are generally lucky enough to enjoy high standards of both education and living, and can focus our efforts on our classrooms.

Back in Mexico, Governor Ruiz Ortiz had dutifully maintained the Oaxacan government’s tradition of marked indifference to the state’s students, the vast majority of whom are poor, rural, and indigenous. Likewise, the teachers who witness this poverty everyday in their classrooms are rural, indigenous, although they are ‘middle class’. Nevertheless, teachers can count on the public to rally behind them because the teachers’ mission is to help transform their communities, in the classroom and as community organizers.

For the majority of teachers in Oaxaca, the reason for teaching is neither education for its own sake, nor is it to prepare students for the world of work. According to Fernando Estrada, a high school social sciences teacher, the goal of their classroom work is to teach for social change. But teachers have another, equally important, role. After their classes are done, they are community organizers that work with communities to help themselves demand greater rights and better living conditions. To many, this form of class warfare through popular education is simply part of a teacher’s way of life. Besides building links with the community, this organizing builds into the local social movements, and is an important reason for the public support for teachers. Says Estrada, “We are community leaders. That is why we have community support. That is why they can’t beat us.”

This approach to unionism, known as ‘political’ or ‘social justice’ unionism, demands that union members approach union activity, including bargaining, as a means of broad social transformation, not merely as a means to get more pay or longer prep time. It means identifying strongly with the students that you teach in order to help them and their families transform their living conditions so that they can alleviate their poverty. It means being active in a progressive social movement. Teachers that don’t identify with this sentiment are encouraged to seek employment in another field.

This current of political unionism practised by Mexican teachers went out of fashion in the West after the Second World War, when the new Keynesian economic strategies led to an increase in purchasing power among our working and middle classes. Unions in the industrial nations could focus on making gains in their collective agreements, and leave social questions to other social movements that were gaining strength at the time. The strategy of ‘business’ unionism replaced the tradition of the ‘political’ unionism that produced the Winnipeg General Strike and the Regina Manifesto, which made significant demands for the benefit of average Canadians.

Yet the economic conditions that produced a relatively high standard of living for a great mass of Canadians have changed significantly since the Mulroney government and continue to change. The downward redistribution of wealth of the postwar era has been reversed by a series of conservative administrations that have realized how the power of ideas can be used to convince Canadians that privatization works, that low taxes are good for the middle class, and that unions generally make people lazy. Public sector unions, especially teacher unions, can no longer rely solely on tough negotiations to guarantee decent wages and working conditions.

Conservatives in Canada and teachers in Mexico, polar opposites on the political spectrum, share a common successful political strategy. Oaxacan teachers hosting radio programmes and the National Post front-page op-eds share a desire to articulate their ideas to the public consciousness. The classic notion that political power is something exercised during an election campaign or a strike is grossly limited because power resides in the everyday ideas of everyday people. The Mexican teachers and the Post editors understand the group that communicates most effectively and persuasively wields the most political power. On the other hand, our current labour strategy generally involves using brute force to secure our needs. Our only bargaining chip is labour action, something that erodes public support instead of reinforcing it, making it even harder for us to bargain aggressively in the next round. There is no question that the strike or work-to-rule is an important tool, but it can’t be our default tactic.

Although the Days of Action during the Harris days were a powerful – if abortive – display of labour strength, it did not receive the sustained support of the community. Popular support, initial or sustained, has been a problem that has plagued teacher bargaining tactics since then. One possible reason is that as teachers and as unionists we have been guilty of failing to convince Canadians of the importance of education. Occasional editorials by indignant union executives do not constitute a campaign to convince Canadians that good schools and good teachers are among the roots of a functioning society, and this negligence on part has left teachers – and the education system in general – extremely vulnerable to cost-cutting conservatives.

But this lack of ideological engagement is perhaps a symptom of a deeper problem. Perhaps we have forgotten why we teach, as have the technocrats who run the Ministry. Our collective inability to identify and articulate a purpose for schooling has left us without a foundation to campaign on. Our lack of vision leaves us with no motivation to promote education other than professional self-preservation. While educational academies have concerned themselves with management questions (e.g. technology, outcomes, expectations) and teachers have been dealing with the day-to-day realities of teaching, conservatives have promoted the idea that education’s primary goal is to prepare children for the world of work. Conservatives have clear ideas and are acutely aware of the power they contain, while we have forgotten our ideas and their potential for change.

Within this context, and in comparison to that of our Oaxacan colleagues, the recent elementary union executive election takes on an interesting new meaning. The key word of the election campaign was leadership, which just about every candidate professed to have, if not in spades, than at least more than their competitors. But it was difficult to determine – through the debates, discussions, and leaflets – exactly what leadership consisted of.

According to Mr. Estrada in Oaxaca, leadership “is the guts to say: support your community”. Perhaps there is a lesson here. Perhaps real leadership for our teacher unions means articulating a purpose and vision for education and articulating that vision to the membership and to society at large. Perhaps it means fighting for a vision that inspires educators towards a revitalized education movement, one that goes beyond mere funding complaints. Perhaps part of leadership is to start an ideological movement against those in society who would see public schools reduced to knowledge factories, where children are taught only the basic skills to make them marketable.

Again, we return to the notion of ideas, specifically the “war of ideas”. As educators, our role is to prepare students for democratic citizenship, as per the TDSB mission statement. But if our individual and collective consciousnesses are formed by competing ideas, how is it possible not to be sucker the most articulate and convincing ideologue. It seems that democracy is subverted at every step. The goal, however, is to educate against indoctrination. According to John Dewey: “The very idea of democracy, the meaning of democracy, must be continually explored afresh; it has to be constantly discovered and rediscovered, remade and reorganized.”

Idealistic and sappy as it may sound, our job as teachers is to promote an awareness among students to question the status quo and to remake it as they see fit. In other words, our job is to help promote alternative, perhaps even oppositional, perspectives that enable students to fight for the world they want. It is what Antonio Gramsci might have called “counter-hegemonic insurgence training”. We do not want our children to passively inherit the world from us. We do not want to simply transmit our current system of values and beliefs to them; at no time does indoctrination, active or passive, fit the mandate of public education in a supposedly democratic state. To prepare students for democratic citizenship, if that is truly our aim, means helping them critically and empathically question their most basic assumptions, and giving them the tools they need to create a just and meaningful world.

Leadership in the teachers’ union, therefore, cannot afford to lead nowhere. Instead, it means a return to political unionism on two fronts: re-establishing critical, democratic pedagogy in our classrooms, and articulating this as the incredibly important reason for schooling in society at large. Leading somewhere means reaching beyond the day-to-day operations of the union and next round of bargaining; rather, it expands into challenging members with bold initiatives to fight for public education, and to find allies in other movements by supporting social justice in general. Leadership means helping our students, colleagues, and the public to rediscover the importance of schooling.

Sound idealistic and unrealistic? Not in Oaxaca, where every night teachers huddle by barricades, ready to defend their demands for better schools and better government.

Activists and progressive executives in our union do engage in these struggles, and often make significant differences to these campaigns. Unfortunately, however, teachers are exhausted by their work and are unable to significantly undertake activist projects. Likewise, executives are busy enforcing their collective agreement and running the organization. Both activists and progressive executives feel constrained by the potential reaction of a membership that is perceived as conservative and passively hostile to anything seen as radical (e.g. divesting ETFO’s $3 million of Israel Bonds. If apartheid is wrong in South Africa, it’s wrong everywhere).

As explained above, teacher unions are not able to effectively engage in political action because they are, fundamentally, business unions with mild sentiments of social justice. Due to the constraints of time and re-election, their leadership is unable or unwilling to move towards a political or social justice orientation. Again, however, the vicious irony is that by not engaging in progressive politics or social justice initiatives, teachers lose the opportunity to convince the public of the importance of education. The disconnect between the education system and an unsympathetic electorate allowed Mike Harris to reorganize education in the worst possible way and still get re-elected.

The starting point for any effort to reform teacher unions is a confrontation with the membership. Social and political questions are not the daily bread and butter of most teachers; in fact it is worth asking yourself how often staff room conversation revolves around questions of educational philosophy or policy. But a union that seeks to build a collective vision for education needs to directly engage with its members about why they teach, and how their practice as teachers and citizens impacts the living and learning conditions of their students. Popular education initiatives within our unions, based on the work of Paolo Freire, are the first step towards such a renaissance.

In order to rediscover leadership within our unions, we must ask executives exactly where and how they plan to lead teachers. Those who see value in democracy and social justice must be educated, encouraged, and pressured to really lead members towards democratic, critical pedagogy, and to articulate this as the purpose for education to society at large. A teacher union that has the courage and capacity to provide leadership towards an inspiring education movement, and not just the next round of bargaining, is one of our best hopes for democracy and social justice.

Just ask the members of Section 22, National Education Workers’ Union, in Oaxaca.

Toronto, January 15th, 2007 - 2,349 w.

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