In the 1990s, the then Grupo Sophia Foundation, founded and directed by Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, already had the educational project that it would put into practice when they became government.
This project is the one that is being carried out and includes the notions of competition and efficiency in the same sense in which it is proposed by the World Bank and by all the organizations that support and implement the economic reform of education at an international level.
This includes the variegated private world, businesses, universities, foundations and NGOs, intervening not only in the didactic/pedagogical areas, but also in the construction of the political framework, with the training of neoliberal cadres to carry out an “educational transformation” inspired by the control, persecution and harassment.
One of the examples is the legal complaints against relatives of students who had taken over the schools in just cause. And in that same disciplinary sense there is the persecution of Jorge Adaro, leader of the Ademys teachers’ union, with a judicial file for union violation.
Or the investigation launched against the vice-rector of Ens n. 2 Mariano Acosta – nothing is accidental -, Julio Pasquarelli, for having been with his students during the last takeover of the school. While Horacio Rodríguez Larreta described the teacher’s action as “indoctrination”, the minister Soledad Acuña (graduated in Political Sciences (UBA) with postgraduate specialization at the University of San Andrés (UdeSA) and also trained at the Foundation Grupo Sophia) accuses him of “downstream line”.
It is more than interesting how serial harassers feel harassed when they hear arguments that go against their policies of intervention, privatization and expropriation, which puts them on a real military offensive, deploying devices and descriptions typical of a genocidal dictatorship.
Not long ago, we had written For what, education?
the decisions on the closure of careers in the Higher Technical Training Institutes (IFTS), another measure promoted by the slogan “The transformation does not stop” of the Municipality, decision of the economist Juan Pablo Becerra, director of Learning Management a tutto life, who has argued that among the reasons for closing careers, the current context had been considered in order to define the strategic offer for the City and therefore the one with the greatest performance in the socio-productive sector should be privileged; which is to say that the market defines the learning that will be offered and what will be declared obsolete.
We have also said that the reform is advancing with a productivist logic and frees subjects such as Philosophy and Ethics from training in Physical Education. Just as a reform of Primary and Initial Education teachers is already underway for 2023 which would follow the path of reformulating the General Education Area of all teachers, adopting the same criteria of obsolescence as the Human and Social Sciences, applying a bureaucratic criterion characteristic of the instrumental intelligence, which governs the reform.
On the 23rd of this month, it was announced by the educational portfolio that, in the Alicia Moreau de Justo and Mariano Acosta Teacher Training Institutes, enrollment for the first year of 2023 for teachers of Physics yes Language and literaturehave also announced that the additional registrations will not open, nor the validation for the race of Psychopedagogy.
The graduate of Education Sciences, graduate of the University of San Andrés, Emmanuel Lista, director of the coordination unit of the teacher training system is the one who carried out and notified these closure decisions which are supplemented by the refusal to prolong the enrollment period for Primary and Initial Education teachers, which also resulted in a quota of 40 candidates.
The logic of capital prevails in the educational market where business corporations define learning and decide on the individual and collective existence of the population. Educational policy is marked by the world order which delimits what is “important”. And what is “important” is the generation of adaptable and flexible subjectivities, for this reason the macro-pedagogic model is that of social control and discipline; it is the suspension and retraining of teachers that justifies government measures against teacher training institutions.
Yet, after 30 years of reform, these officials from elite universities are thinking of the public in a commercial context that must respond to productivity and efficiency.
What is interesting is that in the case in question, this Municipality and the public administration formed in elitist educational bubbles and in foundations that operate as cults with a class formation that despises the public as a municipality, while appreciating it as a bargaining chip, are the ones which contribute most to promoting social inequalities, even if they claim the exact opposite.
After 15 years of PRO rule, continuing to insist that the lack of teacher training is just a product of the poor training received in the elite bubble, or acknowledging that the training given by its interest groups, foundations, NGOs and private universities, in those at in which you actively participate are an academic fiasco.
In addition to celebrating million-dollar agreements paid with public money, such as those entered into with the Varkey Foundation and others such as Enseña por Argentina, a subsidiary of Teach for America, whose founder, Oscar Ghillioni, today continues to be a pro government education officer.
The list goes on with the others. Entrepreneurs such as Gabriel Sánchez Zinny, former Grupo Sophia Foundation and also a UdeSA graduate, owner of Kuepa.com and other offshore companies, who was general manager of schools with María Eugenia Vidal (UCA graduate and former Grupo Sophia), such as governor of the province of Buenos Aires. School closures and serial definancing of infrastructure.
Lack of funds which led to the tragic deaths of Sandra Calamano and Rubén Rodríguez, respectively deputy director and assistant of elementary school n. 49 “Nicolás Avellaneda” in the city of Moreno in Buenos Aires just over 4 years ago and as a result of a gas repeatedly denounced, but never heard from the competent authorities.
Returning to Emmanuel’s official list, in September of this year he wrote for infobae an article stating that “it is necessary to build policies and a network of programs aimed at the training of in-service teachers and accompanying schools, even more in increasingly complex contexts for teaching (…) This requires systemic programming, the reorganization of current investments and a commitment supported by authorities and institutions. Hard work not without resistance from the status quo. But, at the same time, it represents an opportunity to prioritize institutions, deepen policies, and address the enormous challenges and inequalities our education system is going through. There is no sustainable educational improvement if we do not take care of teacher training”.
Interesting expression of hope, but they have been in government for 15 years, and they solve everything with the closure of the teaching staff, or with the enigmatic creation of UNICABA, as Trojan horse for what they are doing now. It results in what she calls “the reorganization of investment.” emptyingas well as what they call “resisting the status quo” with which to resolve it summary process yes judicializationWe have already given the examples.
How can a scrapping policy be “the possibility of prioritizing institutions” and that this is the way to correct the “inequalities that our education system is going through”?
Is ‘sustainable educational improvement’ a result of teacher cutbacks?
Of course, the confrontation is ideological, the debate on the concept of the common, of the public must be at the center of a bottom-up pedagogical congress, because the first step is the nationalization of a system fragmented into 24 jurisdictions, which has ended up consolidating the profound inequalities , even within each of the 24 educational systems to which are added corporate foundations and NGOs with their own points of view and interests, always aligned with international mandates and also influencing training policies, a process that is related to colonized thought.
If “sustainable educational improvement” is to announce partial closures (for now) of training institutions on December 23, it is because what they are looking for is the generation of uncertainty, anger and discomfort, which is their way of managing the City, of managing the education, health management. Leaving hundreds of workers and aspiring teachers in uncertainty at the end of the year is only possible when the perverse is the main component of political action in managerial terms.
They definitely don’t govern, Esteban Bullrich (a Systems graduate of CAECE University and another former Fundación Grupo Sophia and partner of Gabriel Sánchez Zinny in Formar Foundation, another off shore) once said before UIA businessmen, “I’m not here as an education minister, but as an HR manager”, a whole definition of PRO management policies in the educational area.
Inside Sofia’s world, there is no public education, there is a pedagogy of submission and loss of rights. The Sofia’s world it is the imaginary of government where moral supremacists and dispossession leaders settle.
Source: https://tramas.ar/2022/12/28/por-una-educacion-de-calidad-la-destruccion-no-para/
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