Unified twelve-year basic compulsory school

Introduction

The Department of Education presents, in this text, the propositions of KKE (Communist Party of Greece, GSP) for the school of the popular needs and the social demands of our times. The Unified Twelve-year Basic School constitutes a political proposition, the collective fruit of pedagogic research but also of the practical experience of the working class movement in the struggle for education that will serve the needs of our people. Our aim is for it to become a basis for a boarder discussion within the people, with the participation of young people, teachers, and parents, the working class as a whole. It is also to test it in practice, while attempting to provoke positive thinking. To orientate them to the actual and radical confrontation of the education problems, attempting to boost the orientation and the effectiveness of the struggle. To contribute to the organization of the popular counter-attack in the front of education, so as not to be restricted to struggles in the rearguard, in the face of the anti-education policy. Our aim is also to prepare the popular movement, to confront with the strategic plans of the capital, which are realized in education and in society. It does not, therefore, constitute a processing of the numerous technocratic issues. It is a thesis that we believe that focuses on the most important and substantial concerns regarding the problem of education, in order to propose a solution and to directly orientate towards the social and political means of its application. What was and is still missing, are not the technocratic proposals but the political volition, and policy on education; this will be vigorously imposed by the people and will be confronting with all those who machinate against the education of the young people and who aim at the manipulation of their conscience.

These issues have preoccupied our thinking and our activity, before the appearance of one more “education cosmogony”. The government of PASOK, in a recital of deceit and disorientation, announced an education “of open horizons” with the alteration of the structure of lyceum and of the system of access to the Highest Education Institutes. If, though, they were truly interested in the mass edification of our people, they would start from point A, from Basic- General Education; they would ensure that it would be expanded. They would face the lyceum us a phase of a unified education process and they would not exclusively focus on examinations, but on tuition and edification, on the content and the objective of the school. Why, after all, does our current government, as well as the other parties, make so much fuss about the abolition of entering examinations and pretend to care so much about “unhindered access” to the Highest Education Institutes? Does the much-advertised “unhindered access” eliminate the selection or does it lead to the even stricter control of the access to university, starting from the previous level? Can they confront the huge problems which are born by a system based on the “market economy” – unemployment, class discrimination, competitiveness – or on the contrary, do they wish to veil them, in order to protect capitalism from the inevitable “social vibrations”?

By putting into force the law 2525/97 the government promised that all graduates of the “Unified Lyceum” would be able to have university edification. This promise is now being realized by gradually phasing out the number of graduates; this is already becoming visible from the first attempts being made to put it into operation. (The way, in which the selection and preparation of these elite will carry on in the Higher Education, will become visible after the multi – diversification of the institutions and of all kinds of programs, their division in two circles - of the undergraduate and post graduate studies -, the infliction of fees, and the disconnection of the degree from the working prospects). Nowadays, the leadership of the ministry of education openly admits its objective, which is the phasing out of those who graduate from the lyceum to 30%, which is the average number of graduates in the imperialist EU. It was, therefore, their conscious choice, through the full connection of the lyceum to the system of entering Highest Education Institutes, to continue the process of class diversification in education. The division of the lyceum in different branches - which took up from the negative tradition of the “options”, starting from the 2nd Grade in the lyceum – with the inclusion of subjects and syllabus which have reference to Highr Education; the fact that they regard “assessment” as the most important thing in education; the abolition of the institution of re-examination and the objectification of the examinations in the 2nd Grade and the final examinations in the 3rd Grade – which transfer Pan-Hellenic general examinations in the lyceum; all these are the characteristics of a hard discriminatory school, which subsequently leads to the expansion of private education and Para-education activity; an elitist school due to its objective, its curriculum and its methodology, being exclusively oriented to those who manage to enter Higher Education. The rest are gradually channeled out of education to the system of vocational training. The enforcement of the law 2640/98 supplements the reactionary building of the Technical Vocational School – i.e. low lever schools, lacking in a substantial curriculum and in any educational prospect. It intensifies the diversification of High School education and expands the leakage from the lyceum at that (higher) level. The rest of the measures of the privatization of state education (meaning the conversion of the Organization of School Building into an anonymous association; the transmission of the responsibility of school building to the Municipalities, and that of the textbooks from the Organization Textbook Publishing to the School Committees; the sub-financing of state education), which are planned in the name of “decentralization” and “assessment of school units”, reveal the attempt to strengthen the class barriers even from the early level of primary school and Junior High School; to downgrade the educational level, to orient the majority of the young people to premature vocational training.

Away from GCP, any exam-centered confrontation of the theme, either with the form of patchwork proposition that leaves untouched the reactionary frame or with the abstract denial of the examinations independently from the educational system. Those who isolate the examination system from the specific purpose and character of the school, aim at veiling the cause of the problem. The defining issue is what kind of school the examinations serve, which is the purpose of education policy. The examinations by themselves don’t constitute education. The nature of school defines the character of the examinations. In a school of General Education, which would aim at an all-round edification of people’s personality, examinations could function as an element of teaching feedback and as a motive of the learning process, and would have the form of a reward and not that of the rejection of the student. Their value for the assessment of the student and the education activity as well, is relative, because personality is not a countable dimension and the teacher would not come to ascertain the mechanical correspondence to partial knowledge and diagnose qualifications but to assess and reinforce the total endeavors of the student. And the individual performance in some examinations is not enough to judge the student’s endeavor, which is smaller or bigger depending on the different starting point of each student; it is defined by the economic and cultural environment and, of course, the class origin. So the assessment of the student in school has to add up the overall endeavor of the certain student and to encourage it, because it is obligated to aim at boosting each one of them to get over the barriers through the completion of their education. But, assessment of candidates for universities will serve and judge not the general education level that everyone can and must obtain when finishing school, but the specific skills that are needed, e.g. for a candidate doctor or engineer. Here, assessment concerns the future professional specialization, and for this reason aims at the division and selection that is defined every time by the social standards of the labor division and the level of the productive forces. So, when High School interferes in the process of entering Higher Education, then the last traces of general education disappear, because the social selection is transferred in it.

We cannot be opposed to vocational specialization; either it concerns professions which demand high scientific adequacy and research, or others which do not demand a university education. We are, though, opposed to the premature specialization and coercive choice of profession that takes place before the age that humans can live as independent members of society. When young people enter the process of choosing a vocational direction, before fully developing their personality multi-laterally, before fulfilling the education dimension of their social edification, then this choice is pre-determined by the class position of his family, reproduces the existent social inequalities and distinctions, is an obstacle to the integrated and harmonious development of their abilities and their social progress. It is subsequently a class selection. The process of reproducing the specialized workforce and scientific workforce must not be related to General Education - the latter owes to extend during the whole process of edification until the young person reaches the age of 18. For this reason, GCP proposes the disconnection of High School from the process of entering Higher Education; in general GCP is opposed to the division of education before the young people reach adulthood. The selection of profession and the specialization, be it of a university level or not, must be built on the foundations of the integrated Basic-General Education.

For this reason, we are opposed to the system of superficial vocational instruction which the capitalists of Europe present as a medicine that will cure any social disease, from illiteracy to unemployment. It is a combination of unfounded knowledge and empirical skills, which are offered mainly out of the process of the education (Institutes of Vocational Instruction, Centers of Vocational Instruction, apprenticeship in corporations). It is a cheap substitute to education, practicing those mental or physical abilities that “market” needs, so as to have at its disposal a skilled workforce, obedient and not dangerous for the powerful of the system. The promotion of “Vocational Instruction” is the central direction of the reactionary restructuring that capitalists impose on education, by paraphrasing the needs of our times, in the language of their class interests. “Life-long learning” has become, during the last decade, the alibi of all the capitalistic countries, for the mass and premature eviction of the youth from education. The “society of knowledge” is promoted as the vision of the anti-education policy, a so-called “post-capitalistic” society that maintains all the basic characteristics of capitalism… except its conflicts. This way, the apologists of capitalism want to get over with socialism and class struggle. So, knowledge becomes an end in itself, it is isolated from the socio-economic system; thus, each person is asked to build his education ‘on his own’, collecting knowledge and skills. Their school solely undertakes the duty to secure the minor cognitive base and mainly to cultivate the pattern of “continuous learning”- that’s how they call the sense of littleness in front of a world that is supposedly impossible for us to understand as a whole and change it. The issue, for them, is for us to adjust and ‘save our own selves’. Obscurantism is dominant. Capitalism, in its crisis, can only provide such visions. We don’t have to analyze, here, the specific duties imposed by monopolies on education through their imperialist unions and their social and political representatives: through the report of OECD, White Papers of E.U., the propositions of Round Table of the European Industrialists, the Federation of Greek Industries, the bourgeois parties and all of the supporters of the “society of knowledge”. They are preparing the modern Middle-Ages.

They try to conceal the school’s main problem: what kind of person society wants to create. Today, the level of knowledge, of science, and its role in production, demands more and more deeply cultivated and harmoniously developed people, capable of seeing not only a branch of a tree but the whole forest, i.e. the social system of production; it demands people with a Cosmo theory scientific base. Not weak people that will be defining their course in life, in the basis of the short-sided limited individual perspective, running to catch up with developments. But, strong people so as to be able to confront all the future problems that will possibly occur in their lives, having a wide social perspective, constituting a conscious contribution in social evolution. Here, though, the needs and demands of the ruling class do not coincide with the demands of our people. And there is obviously a tendency in the whole capitalistic European Union to reproduce people who are deprived of material and intellectual wealth, of traditions and the conscience of their humanity, people that are easily ‘put in moulds’ under the demands of each capitalist and the strategic objectives of the capital. Thus, the problems and contradictions will increase.

We are opposed to partiality, to the mechanical human being, physically exhausted and intellectually manipulated, where the “life-long learning” ends. For this reason, we propose the need for a wide quantitatively and qualitatively Basic-General Education. High department of such an education must be the grades of today’s Senior High School, serving not the vocational pre-selection but the general social edification of the young man. We don’t want a parallel to the general education, circuit of vocational instruction. Neither a Senior High School autonomous from the basic compulsory education, because, then, we would maintain the hallway of Higher Education. In other words, we don’t wish to perpetuate the long-lasting problems of school: the low level of basic education, the fragmentation of knowledge, the division between theory and practice, the division between science and its application in social life. In “Unified Lyceum” of this reactionary reformation, that is neither unified nor basic school, in the so-called upgrading of education, in the so-called free entering, in the so-called lack of an alternative suggestion, we in turn suggest the Unified Twelve-year Basic Compulsory School, as a prerequisite of further education and choice of life.

The rich militant traditions and acquisitions and the recent struggles for the abolition of the anti-education laws 2525/97 and 2640/98 show that young people will not stop fighting for a better education than the one that their fathers and grandfathers had. The very massive objection of our people towards the attended eviction of students from education, the demand for the disconnection of senior high school from the entrance system and closing down of Technical Educational Schools, showed the need and the demand: the Unified Twelve-year Basic school for everybody, before any procedure of selection or specialization. People will correspond to our proposition. Popular will and struggle will cast a blow on the face of the anti-education policy. Tomorrow’s school is not built by the “contractors” of yesterday.