The global Assault on Teachers, Teaching, and Teacher Unions

Abstract

Teachers in every part of the world are in the forefront of the struggle to ensure that children receive an education—whether in U.S. cities, the mountains of Chavez’s Venezuela, in civil war-torn Nepal, in Europe’s towns and countryside, or in the refugee camps of Sudan. In prosperous nations, identified by global justice activists as the global north, teachers’ wages, their voice in policy, and the quality of their working conditions have been reduced. In the south, societies that lack power and wealth in the new global economy, teachers are working for a pittance, sometimes unpaid, too often poorly trained or with no training at all. In many parts of Africa they teach children in classes of over 100, sometimes under trees or squatting in churches. Textbooks are nonexistent, libraries and computers a distant dream, and basic materials in short supply. When wars occur, declared or not, schools are taken over and the children evicted, as has been done in Congo and by the Israeli army in the Palestinian West Bank. In Sri Lanka and the Indian Ocean islands, schools were wiped out by the tsunami, and while luxury resorts are being built, school construction lags. In impoverished city neighborhoods in the “developed” world, from Paris and London to Berlin and New York, teachers are struggling against reduced school funding, racism, and social and economic dislocation to try to ensure that all children receive quality schooling.