La Otra Educacion: Zapatista Schools

The speaker above inaugurated the workshop by welcoming the assembled crowd and by explaining that in creating Zapatista schools, the community had reclaimed its own education, had taken schools out of the hands of the government and put them in the hands of the people.

This representative from Caracol 1 (La Realidad), gave statistics from the area demonstrating the greater retention of female students in EZLN schools, and spoke of the expansion of the Zapatista education system.

La Otra Educacion, Jesus explains, is bilingual, supporting the mother tongue and preserving indigenous culture. In (mal) government schools, children learn and speak only Spanish, but by teaching both Zapatista schools better prepare their students.

Ideology is a part of education, explicitly or not, and This representative of Caracol 2 (Oventic) explains that 'we will not permit them to teach capitalism' and the doctrine of neoliberalism to Chiapaneco children.

This file contains perhaps my favorite quote of the day, in which the other representative from Caracol 2 explains that 'miedo es la negacion de democracia' (Fear is contrary to democracy). He went on to give a webpage address for more information about Zapatista schools http://www.serazln-altos.org/celm.html and explain three important aspects of La Otra Educacion: first, that the teachers are volunteers; second, that their schools teach about the environment so that children learn to defend the land and its natural resources; and third, that the schools in revolt support the idea that the genders are equal in intelligence.

The workshop briefly paused while we moved outside to accomodate the large crowd (where the audio quality dropped significantly). The one file I'll post is a representative of Caracol 4, who spoke about the (mal) government's schools ('No nos ensenaban!' / They didn't even teach us!) and the process for setting up an alternative, one which even some non-Zapatista aligned parents now send their children to. Elisa explains that parents pulled their children out of the government schools and supported the development of la otra educacion instead for many reasons, one of them being that government schools taught girls that they didn't have the same rights to learn or to speak as the boys.

For gender equality, for the survival and propagation of native languages, for the right to tell their own stories, for the preservation and safeguarding of indigenous culture, for freedom from military control,...

For autonomy.

Desde Oventic...