Zapatista Teachings in the Classroom
What have we learned from the Zapatistas in the 30 years since their uprising? How can their teachings be applied in the classroom? A review of some of the praxis of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, UNAM.
What have we learned from the Zapatistas in the 30 years since their uprising? How can their teachings be applied in the classroom? A review of some of the praxis of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, UNAM.
Last week, as part of our outreach program Schools for Chiapas received a visit from a youth group from the US at Sendas (https://schoolsforchiapas.org/visit-from-us-youth-group-to-sendas/). Here is a short account of the visit from one of the participants.
“We know that we are not alone in this journey. How many compañeros and compañeros have come to these lands of ours to share their knowledge, to teach us and for us to teach them, how much they have dedicated their whole lives to share our word, our thinking, to look for ways to support us in this struggle that belongs to all of us,” Manuel shares, the emotion so visible on his young face. “Thanks to this support we can continue to build our schools and clinics, develop materials, have access to medical equipment that allows us to care for our sick…”
Luis Hernández Navarro marks the anniversary of the formation of an institution of popular struggle for emancipatory education – the CNTE.
The CNTE is heir and keeper of the pedagogical work of great educators who forged rural education in the country, such as José Santos Valdés, Raúl Isidro Burgos and Isidro Castillo. It takes up the legacy of the communist and Cardenista teachers who promoted agrarian reform, the struggle against religious fanaticism and the organization of workers’ unions, and who were assassinated, impaled and disoriented by neo-Christians and landowners.
Whitewashing the past, de-radicalizing it, polishing the sharpest edges of its emancipatory episodes has been a recurrent obsession of our modernizing elites. But, despite the endless repression agains rural normal schools and their students, as Luis Hernández Navarro points out, they are not going away.