Last Friday, in his opening speech to the ordinary sessions of Congress, President Javier Milei expressed: “
In an Argentina where children do not know how to read and write, we can no longer allow Baradel and his friends to use students as hostages. to negotiate joint agreements with the provincial governments.
For this reason, we included education as an essential service in the decree of necessity and urgency, which will take the weapon out of the unions' hands and force them to provide at least 70% of the educational service during any strike.
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It is impossible not to agree with his assessment.
More than five years ago, in September 2018, I published a column in Clarín titled: “Teaching strikes do involve a risk of life.”
In it I asked myself who could maintain that a child or young person who attends school in the midst of systematic teacher strikes had the same opportunities to develop, in the knowledge society in which he or she has had to live, as another who attends a school. privately managed.
It is clear that their future life is irremediably affected, even if we wish to deny it.
Therefore, as I argued in that note, teaching strikes do involve a life risk for our children and young people;
Their future would be radically different from being able to attend the schooling that the State has the obligation to guarantee and, therefore, there is sufficient reason to declare education as an essential service.
His declaration will defend the right to education of children and young people who attend publicly managed schools and will reduce the exodus to privately managed schools by many families who make immense efforts so that their children, at least, have classes every year. days.
This fact, although positive, is not free;
nothing is free.
It will generate additional pressure on the public education system, which would be added to that caused by the tremendous economic crisis facing our country, which has put many parents in the dilemma of continuing to pay fees in privately managed schools or emigrate their children to publicly managed schools.
How to obtain the undoubted benefits of declaring education as an essential service and, at the same time, avoid the potential collapse of the public management system, in the face of the massive enrollment of students as a result of the economic crisis?
For more than ten years I have proposed a proposal that would meet this objective.
It consists of creating, by the State, a simple savings account for educational expenses of those affected students;
a tool that would give families who are facing very difficult times today, for which they are not responsible but innocent victims, the possibility of continuing to decide about their children's schooling.
This account would be managed by the parents, in such a way that their children could continue attending the school that the family has chosen at the time and not the one that, as a direct consequence of the economic crisis generated by the outgoing administration, they will have to attend.
A proposal of these characteristics would complement the declaration of education as an essential service, by reducing the demand pressure generated on the public management system by virtue of the economic crisis, and would represent a radical paradigm shift in Argentine education, by returning to parents the prominence that they should never have lost in the education of their children.
Edgardo Zablotsky is Rector of the CEMA University and Member of the National Academy of Education.