From: CIEPAC <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2001 13:29:10 -0600 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Ciepac-i] English Chiapas al Dia 262 I BOLETIN �CHIAPAS AL DIA� No. 262 CIEPAC; CHIAPAS, MEXICO September 26, 2001 Education and Indigenous Autonomy (Part II) Many are asking �What is indigenous autonomy for the Zapatistas?� As part of a series of bulletins on this subject, we have spoken already on women and health. We will now touch on the subject of education in the context of the counter-reform on indigenous rights and culture, approved by the Executive and Legislative powers. It is this autonomy that the governmental powers continue to harass in the indigenous communities and territories, an action that has sharpened in the context of the terrorism that destroyed the Twin Towers in New York. The militarization in indigenous territories in Chiapas has increased. We will begin our analysis of autonomous education in an autonomous Zapatista community. �Autonomous education began seeing to the necessities; it is not like government education.� (Regional Education Commission). �Education is very important, as everything comes from education.� (Education promoter) When the EZLN arose in 1994, one of their principal demands was education. Nonetheless, part of their autonomy has signified for the indigenous that they begin to construct their own reality, without waiting for the government to comply with their demands. For this reason, in many autonomous Zapatista municipalities, autonomous education is already being implemented; an educational system that offers an alternative to the governmental education system. GOVERNMENT EDUCATION AND AUTONOMOUS EDUCATION Consciousness is born when problems are recognized, upon understanding one�s reality, and identifying ways in which a people are oppressed. For the indigenous Zapatista communities, State education has been just one more way for the government to mistreat them, to deny them their culture and rights. The Regional Education Commission explains why they decided to form an autonomous education system, and what it signifies: �The relationship between education and autonomy can be seen in our own autonomous education system. We can teach our own people as we wish. We reflect on how we want to learn and we teach accordingly. It is based on autonomy and it is different from the governmental education, because in the governmental education system they teach a single language (Spanish) and we want to be able to learn in our own language. In their language, we are obligated to learn their ideas, and we believe that it should not be like this. We have observed that if we want our own education, it is better to do it ourselves, to name our own teachers, promoters, and also to include our own culture. In the official education, our culture could get lost, and indigenous children will not have the opportunity to know their own culture. And they would be ashamed to be indigenous. We have seen this in cases where people that have gone to study in government schools. It is not right we do not agree with this system. We want an education that supports the people, not the government. The government has an education system that benefits them and nothing for the people. This is why we have decided to look for our own teachers and to teach them how to teach.� �In the official education, they are hiding what, in reality, is happening in the country: exploitation, oppression. They do not help to understand the situation in the country, the suffering of the people, the reality that we live. The government is hiding the truth through its teachers, because teachers are the ones who insert the government�s ideas into children�s minds so that they do not wake up, so that they do not learn the country�s history or their own reality. But what we want to study is the real history, to discover our own thoughts, not only to read and write. We want to study the situation in the country, how our ancestors organized. For example, they never tell us that they had their own autonomy. Waking a child, the government is afraid that a political organizer will arise, a person who truly knows reality.� �What the government wants is that we take on their customs. It wants to obligate us to use the same customs and ideas as they use. They tell us stories, but they are stories of the country�s suffering they are stories of cities, stories of how they are living. The ideas of the government started with the children, when they were still studying with the government teachers. They taught us things that made us lose sight of our culture, for example, that our ancestors did not read and write, that they did not use arithmetic. But we know that is not true, that our ancestors did use math. They were very wise.� �Our fathers started losing the culture of our ancestors. Not because they wanted to, but because the government�s plan was very strong. The government forced their ideas upon them. What we want to rescue is that which is not yet lost, what exists still today in the communities.� Along with the rejection of indigenous culture there are various concrete complaints of many of the official teachers: that they abuse the children, that they do not teach in native languages, that they work for a salary and not for conviction, and that they work few days a week. When the indigenous communities began to organize, they knew that they would no longer accept these things. �I only finished the third grade of primary education in the government school. But I learned there, by experience, that one does not really learn in the government schools. It is not a good course of study, the teachers are not good, they only come one or two days a week, and they collect their full salary. We learned next to nothing. We believe that children should not be beat. For example, in the government schools, if you miss a day, the next day they are waiting with a ruler to hit you. This is not good one should not hit children. When they make mistakes they should be corrected so that they understand their errors. When children are hit, they don�t feel like learning the only thing they learn is fear and dejection.� The education promoters are the community teachers; they are the ones that implement the autonomous education, the ones that teach children in their own communities. Some of these community teachers speak of government education and autonomous education: �Our autonomous education is very different from government education because the government teachers us things that are not useful. They teach us for their own interest, not because they care for the indigenous. For this reason, autonomous education systems were formed, so that children can be taught our culture and rights in our own language. When I went to the government school, it was very different from our autonomous schools because they do not teach us in our own language and they beat us mercilessly. If one did not answer correctly, he or she was beat on the hands with a ruler. In autonomous education, if a child does not understand Spanish, we can explain a problem in Tzeltal or whatever language we speak. Also, the children have the confidence of admitting when they do not know something.� (Eva, education promotor). �On the subject of autonomous education, it is very important for us, as education promoters and also for the community. There, we learn how to teach children in two languages (Spanish and Tzeltal), and to respect their rights as children and the ideas they express in school. The government schools are different because the federal teachers abuse children; they punish them when they do not do their assignments. On the other hand, we have more affection for the children and we are working voluntarily we don�t earn a penny. Only with the strength of our community behind us are we advancing, because we have an interest in learning much more about education.� (Doroteo, education promoter) �I am working with the children of my town, with all my heart and with faith that they will pay good attention because they know me, and I am very contented because each day they are learning more about reading and writing. In contrast, the children do not know the government teachers and are afraid of them at first.� (Nicolas, education promotor) HISTORY OF AUTONOMOUS EDUCATION The first step toward the formation of a system of autonomous education was for the indigenous people to identify what they did not like about the government education system: the abuse of children, the lack of respect for the culture and the indigenous languages, and that the official education was a vehicle for presenting government ideas. Another step was to evaluate the knowledge that the indigenous people possess, that does not come from government schools, but that they learned on their own for being organized through the indigenous struggle. �What we have learned has been through our own struggle. We were taught to read and to do addition and multiplication, but very little because we made many mistakes and did not do it well. In the work we do with the organization (EZLN) we achieve another kind of knowledge, another kind of experience. For example, the community elects us for a local responsibility, and within this responsibility we have to resolve problems, inform about the situation, and through this we learn more. One has to understand the political situation, the work, the problems that we live.� �Autonomous education began seeing to the necessities it is not like government education. We began to think of educating among ourselves. We realized that we are forgetting how to count and do sums in our own language. We began to think about our own authority to educate, in having our own teachers. This is how we began to dream about all this. And when we began to organize, we could do it. Even better with the struggle, with the organization. We saw that if we were going to change things, we were going to change everything.� �In 1996 we began to promote autonomous education, through a 60 page study that explains why it is important and why we need to appoint education promoters in each community.� (Regional Education Commission). So they began to promote autonomous education and to advise that communities appoint their own local promoters. The communities named education promoters, but in the beginning they did not have the experience nor the economic resources to be good teachers. They had to look for the ways to learn more, to develop an alternative methodology and autonomous materials, and to form a regional structure to support the promoters. It has not been easy nor fast but there have been advances in the process of establishing an autonomous education. One of the obstacles in the construction of autonomous education is the difficulty of naming community teachers, if they themselves have learned little within the official education system. �We had to look for support to teach ourselves and to teach our promoters about education, because we learned so little in the government schools, and we saw that we needed to learn a little bit more. For this reason, we had to look to civil society to support us with training courses to learn more.� (Regional Education Commission). More than two years ago, the education promoters named began to receive training courses from an educational cooperative in Mexico City. �It is possible that our education is very simple, we have very simple materials for example, the manual that we made to be used in autonomous education. But it is the only way that we have to keep from abandoning the children. It had been a long time that they had been abandoned, because since 1994 they had not had classes. We have a primary school here, but it was abandoned as of January 1, 1994. Without a teacher, without anything.� Some communities continue to face difficulties in naming education promoters. �It is not so easy to find education promoters, people that are in the resistance movement that want to do this work.� (Regional Education Commission) An education promoter explains: �I began this work 2 years and 3 months ago, when the training course began. There were 36 promoters, but many left, in the communities where there is no support. Now there are more or less 30 of us. There are nine that have been working for more than two years. The rest have been teaching for only 4 or 5 months. They don�t come from the same communities as before, where others were left behind.� (Edgar, education promoter) �At any rate, the work of educating is increasing. Seeing to the necessities is how we began to have an action plan, and it is now a plan for the entire region.� (Regional Education Commission) An important moment in the history of autonomous education was the decision to reject the presence of the official teachers in the communities and to establish autonomous education as the principal education system in the autonomous regions. �The official teachers were dismissed starting in December of 1999 and January of 2000. The decision to dismiss them was made as a regional agreement; if we are going to have our own teachers, we don�t need the government teachers there. We don�t want competition or problems. We began to inform them in a nice way, to explain why. Some of the teachers understood, and were more or less in agreement with our autonomous education system. They left understanding that we were going to educate ourselves. The government�s answer when it found out that we dismissed the official teachers was to send more especially in communities where there was division. The government wants us to fight amongst ourselves. In the divided communities, the �PRI� members did not want the official teachers to leave because they do not agree with autonomous education. In these communities, there is competition between the official teacher and the education promoter. We continue to explain to our brothers: we do not want problems. Although they may be from another organization, we are all campesinos. We should always look for a solution. It is very difficult when there are fewer �compa�eros� and more PRI members. Sometimes we tell the promoters �Get out of there so that you don�t have problems.� We have to look for the way, little by little.� (Regional Education Commission). Approximately half of the communities in the autonomous municipalities have a community teacher. In some communities where there is division between EZLN support bases and PRI members, they continue to use official teachers. And there are other communities where the children continue without schools. EDUCATION AND AUTONOMY So that education will really support autonomy, the autonomous municipality has decided that autonomous education has to be based in the indigenous culture. This includes teaching in the mother tongue and the focusing on the importance that the earth has within the indigenous culture. It also includes teaching respect as a fundamental value in the indigenous culture: �Within autonomous education respect for the culture and traditions holds an important place that is what autonomy refers to, it is what the people are living. We are demanding rights and indigenous culture but how are we going to achieve this, if we don�t do it ourselves?� (Edgar, education promoter) �In the autonomous education system, the inclusion of culture is important. There are many things lost already, customs that our father and grandfathers had, many customs that the �kaxlanes� (non-indigenous people) have taken, and we recognize that. But what we don�t want to lose is what still exists. We want to defend the culture and traditions that we still have.� �We want the traditions to apply in education: to learn to read and write, but also to tell stories from our ancestors. In governmental education they do not tell stories about how the people used to organize, nor any stories about the country. What the government wants to do is to erase that from history. That�s why we study, to know history and the problems that the people have been lived through. To keep the culture intact, we believe that it is important to teach in our own tongue. We also teach in Spanish; the promoter speaks what little he knows with the children. But if we learn only one language we are going to forget our culture. That is why it is important to teach in our own language.� � We also teach about the land, about agriculture within our education system, because it is part of our culture as well. We teach the children to read and write and do addition and multiplication, but we also teach them to sow corn and beans, because if we do not they will not know. We saw that this idea is a good one because if a child no longer wants to study, or even if he or she does want to study but also wants vegetables or a plot of land to sow corn, he or she will already know. The children are learning to sow vegetables in a collective garden in the school.� (Regional Education Commission) Autonomous education understands that education forms part of the community life, and has to fortify the same as an integral part of indigenous culture. In the official education system �they teach children the idea that it is alright if you want to humiliate somebody, another child. They do not teach respect. We were not learning respect in the schools. The children learn these bad ideas because they learn from the example of the teachers. The child is not going to respect even his or her own family.� �We also think that education begins in the family. We see that if the children are here and respect their teacher but do not show respect at home, it is not a good education. Also if they show respect at home but do not respect their brothers in the community, it is also not a good education. That is why we say that education springs from the family. If we are not demonstrating a good example at home, we are not giving good education.� �The thing we want most is to respect and be respected within our own community. The ancestors respected each other very much.� (Regional Education Commission) Hilary Klein CIEPAC, A.C. Translated by Maria Elena Sanger for CIEPAC, A.C. Note: If you wish to be placed on a list to receive this English version of the Bulletin, or the Spanish, or both, please direct a request to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and indicate whether you wish to receive the bulletin in plain text or as a Word 7 for Windows 95 attachment. Note: If you use this information, cite the source and our email address. 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