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The Right to Education How to Affirm Education as a Right in Today's Conditions The demands of certain monopolies to "re-start" or "open the economy" is not a recognition of this fact. Instead it is a narrow and self-serving demand that the health and well-being of the people should continue to be sacrificed so that they can continue to make their profits. The working class is being pressured to take up the demand of the monopolies to re-start on the basis of a doom and gloom mentality that if we don't do it now, the sky will fall. This is to try to overwhelm the working class and people and keep them from working out their own discussion and framework for how the economy should be run going forward. The issue is being reduced to "to re-start or not to re-start." This is a false choice. The issue is how to slow the spread of the virus until a vaccine can be produced and to work out an economic recovery that favours the people. This is what we need to work out. When discussing education, one of the major features of the ruling class is to discuss the youth as a problem holding back the workforce as they require care at home. This itself shows that child care and education, simply on the basis of having them publicly available, free up massive human resources that can contribute to building the economy. The economy cannot actually re-start without these services being up and running. How to re-start them in a manner that favours the long-term interests of the society as a whole, and the youth in particular, and not as a knee-jerk reaction to the demands of the monopolies is what must be put at centre stage.
The World Health Organization (WHO) specifically recommends that educators "integrate disease prevention and control in daily activities and lessons. Ensure content is age-, gender-, ethnicity-, and disability-responsive and activities are built into existing subjects." The situation is not to be used simply to dictate orders using fear or threats, but to involve the youth in seeing how rules and regulations should serve the society and contribute to their well-being, and that if they play a role in developing them and arguing them out, they can play their role for themselves and for their families. The WHO has also noted in this respect that schools play a vital role in the dissemination of public health information that can help stem the spread of the virus. Venezuela's experience in using its national ID card portal to send surveys to citizens for responses and then immediately send teams to investigate possible infections door to door should be considered here. Schools can play a role in individualized symptom recognition and treatment once treatments are readily available and for administering vaccinations once these are available. In other words, schools are not simply a holding cell for children; they are a vital link connecting public campaigns and programs and the population as a whole. The WHO provides the following principles to help stop the spread of COVID-19 in schools: - Sick students,
teachers and other staff should not come to
school. Some matters to consider: Child Care First and foremost, without child care being provided on a universal basis for children in kindergarten to grade 8 in advance of any reopening it will be very difficult to reopen anything as parents will be required to stay at home. (Ontario has a minimum age of 16 to stay home alone, however most social service agencies recommend 12). Child care for pre-school children must also be sorted out to ensure it is provided safely. Without child care for teachers and education workers whose children are not of school age it will be difficult for schools to re-open. So the conditions in child care facilities are the first to consider -- making sure they are proper and safe, otherwise the rest will break down. Public Transit Another major issue is the need for increased investments in public transportation. Large numbers of youth get to school on public transit and school buses. To ensure adaquate physical distancing, a large increase in public transit services is required to prevent large line-ups and packed vehicles. More staff are required to ensure proper cleaning of transit services after each route. This is something transit workers themselves are demanding as they can see how the lack of public transit actually harms human health, including their own. Role for Schools in COVID-19 Surveillance Schools need to be set up as part of a primary contact for the health care system. By having each school outfitted with a small clinic staffed by a nurse or nursing student, symptom-monitoring can be led and carried out in the first period class or even by taking temperatures as students and staff first arrive at school. Students or staff who show any symptoms can immediately be sent to the clinic for further examination and testing for the infection to improve treatment outcomes and reduce the spread. Social Distancing Measures WHO provides the following guidelines: - Staggering the
beginning and end of the school day
Proper cleaning of schools will require greater investments in custodial staff so that after each school day all surfaces are cleaned thoroughly -- especially common areas such as doorknobs and desks. New regimes can be put in place for hand washing and cleaning so that this also is not left to chance. This would mean a morning hand washing routine at stations set up outside of schools which is repeated when students and staff leave. The main thing is that the process should be started very slowly with intense monitoring and feedback to medical and health authorities so that changes can be made on a day-to-day basis. This means a connection between each school and the local health unit. Health and safety representatives of the workers at each school should be freed up to meet daily to oversee the implementation of safety protocols. This means establishing that the health and safety committee in each school has to be empowered to collect information and relay it to a school board-wide health and safety committee that would work directly with the local public health authorities and local, provincial and federal levels of government to ensure that all necessary measures are taken.
This article was published in Article Link:   Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca |
What is being
revealed this May Day is the extent to
which the economy is social in nature. Each part
relies on the
others. A healthy population is the basis of any
economy,
following which is the provision of child and
elder care, and
education as well as research. Without a healthy
and educated
workforce the modern economy cannot function,
which means workers
are the basis for the immense value currently
extracted as profit
by the monopolies.
Education is
intimately linked with other areas of the economy
by virtue of the fact that the youth are part of
the society and
the society has responsibilities towards them and
their
well-being. The starting point of any re-start of
the education
system has to affirm the right of the youth to
education. This
necessarily means the right of those who provide
it and of the
youth themselves to a say over how that re-start
begins as it is
their lives and futures that are at stake. In this
process, the
teachers and education workers, as individuals and
through their
unions and health and safety committees in the
workplace; youth,
as individuals and through their student councils;
and parents,
as individuals and through parent committees; as
well as locally
elected trustees, have a right to a say over how
schools are
re-started, and to be part of decision-making.
This is the only
way to implement measures that will be truly
respected and upheld
by those expected to follow the rules. The youth
especially must
be empowered to have a say in the process so that
they can be
part of setting the guidelines that they will have
to live by.
This is an important method to train them in
taking up their
individual and social responsibility, working as a
collective and
learning together.
Before
the COVID-19 outbreak, class sizes went against
what we
see now as appropriate distance measures to
prevent the spread of
infectious disease. Thus, one important matter for
any re-start
is to limit the proximity of students so that
rates of infection
are limited. This also means providing proper
masks for all students
and staff to wear in school and for going to and
from school so the
spread of micro-droplets is limited. Canada
had 5,609,007 students enrolled in
elementary-secondary education
in 2018. This would require approximately
28,000,000 masks per
week for the students alone if using disposable
masks. Washable
masks could be used but would have to be properly
washed at
school to ensure washing is not left to chance.