In the crisis derived from the contingency due to COVID-19, without a doubt, the most affected parties are those that even before were already in a state of vulnerability.
Women, childhoods and sectors of poverty became the first battle front in a world structured by and for men and the production of capital.
According to the UNDP office in Mexico (2020), the new “online” system implemented by the SEP left out 55.7 percent of households, affecting mainly girls and women.
So now that the first half of the 2020-2021 school year is ending, it is a good time to reconsider if the predictions are real and there are privileged layers with access to knowledge for the future and others totally out of the game.
Basic education teachers, by structure mostly women under the subject of “child rearing”, had to reconfigure their homes and classes in a matter of days, applying their own intellectual resources to train themselves, and physical resources such as payment for devices. electronics, electricity, internet and many hours of online attention to students, parents.
Everything, under the same salary.
Girls and adolescents are forced to do housework and live with their abusers, making it difficult for them to return to school; while mothers must work (inside or outside the home) to support the family, pressured by the suffocating economic situation that now also requires them to act as companions for the functioning of a digital educational system, poorly planned and organized more on immediacy than about effectiveness.
Was it possible to change more than 100 years of pedagogical, social and economic structure in a few months? It seems not, and girls, adolescents, mothers and teachers arrive “at halftime” of this battle, with a strong mental load and tripled work; an unsustainable formula, but which was not created by the pandemic, but rather accelerated, in an erosion rooted in gender inequalities and access to wealth that had already been announced, even before the closing of schools.
Let’s face it, although the publication of the vaccine is a breath of fresh air, it is a distant and incomplete solution for re-accessing education and a dignified life in an equal way, as a human right in Mexico.
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