The dignified rage of the teachers

Abstract

On June 10, 2009, in the city of Puebla, during a national mobilization against the so-called Alliance for Quality Education (ACE), promoted in recent months by state authorities and the leaders of the union bureaucracy, around 300 police officers attacked dissident teachers of Section 23 of the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE). Under the banner of modernizing education, improving the curriculum and professionalizing teachers, the ACE represents an attempt to install, as in every advanced liberal democracy, techniques of population control aimed at forming “responsible” citizens, developing individual skills for insertion into the market, and practices of self-surveillance and evaluation of teachers’ work involving the teachers themselves, the administrative bureaucracy, private organizations and parents.