One of the greatest losses caused by the digital age is the achievement of the formative reference of the person, in the construction of their integrity, ethics, humanity, solidarity, cooperation, by the annihilation of the protagonism of primary, elementary, and high school teachers, produced by the bureaucratic-centralizing provided by State Government like a Merit-Based Performance Evaluation System.
In the current big picture about the reality’s today, the institutions endowed with institutional public duty, such as pedagogical teaching and lawyers, have come to be despised as victims of the disintegration of traditional culture as it is submerged by liquid modernity, as if the State, in places where democracy is perverted by opportunistic politicians who exploit the suffering of the people, trading the duty to govern for favors and spoils.
The annihilation of institutional public duty began in 1999, by the initiative of the European Union, the great "City of Business", in imposing through the Bologna Convention, the abandonment of the development of institutional humanity, to place in its place, corporate education.
In other words, the current culture is to limit oneself to buying and selling to achieve the pinnacle of profit, under the euphemism of "hitting targets", which can be seen today, without any surprise, in the current behaviors of self-proclaimed right-wing, ultra-right, and left-wing governments that make up a single flour of selfish, racist, individualistic people, managing urban barbarities, under corruption in all administrative areas, because the entire engine of the current world is in the greed of the language outlined by the Bologna Convention, to obtain some profit for oneself, for one's group, or for one's family. What matters is how much profit was made from it, regardless of how much it weighed, as we witness in the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
This same language, like a great flood, since 2016, has been drowning the last breaths of Institutional Education, and here, as we are in the State of São Paulo, we refer to the State Education Network of São Paulo, which implemented an ultra-corporate school administration system, the Performance Management System, under the political rhetoric Linked to “Meritocracy".
As happened in the pandemic phenomenon, where the teaching process had to change from a physical classroom environment to online from one moment to the next, whose enormous losses are accounted for today, so too was imposed by the rulers in schools, under the unpreparedness of their managers, the performance management model, without considering that it is still unstable within the private corporations that use it, and within them, when they venture to apply it, they do so cooperatively, that is, in a participatory way with an equal-to-equal view, unlike public administration that sees unidirectionally from top to bottom by its centralizing model.
Thus, differently, the State under the demagogic label of dressing in the "modernity of public administrations like a corporations", implemented the private model of performance management system, however under the old swing, of the style of centralizing leadership administration and state bureaucracy, creating an administrative chimera, whose model imposes all kinds of top-down demands on subordinates, without any counter-provision of human capital, hence we ask teachers: Doesn't your labor seem analogous to slavery?
For a calm analysis of the situation, let's first understand what is considered work analogous to slavery in the current time, according to the concept given by the National Council of the Public Ministry:
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What is contemporary slave labor? In Brazilian legislation, Article 149 of the Penal Code provides the elements that characterize the reduction of a human being to a condition analogous to slavery. They are: submission to forced labor or exhaustive labordays, subjection to degrading conditions of job, and restriction of the labor's mobility (National Council of the Public Ministry, Available at https://www.cnmp.mp.br/portal/institucional/conatetrap/trabalho-escravo. Accessed on Oct 19, 2024). |
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Why do we think the teacher's answer will be YES?
a) Because the teacher is subjected to a continuous daily schedule of 9 hours of work, without the opportunity for detachment for rest, keeping them active in direct and indirect activities even during their lunch hour. It has become forbidden to talk about rest between classes of 45 minutes, and it is also forbidden to talk about giving a lecture using a chair to sit on, being continuously monitored by cameras inside the classrooms.
b) Because the teacher cannot be absent. If the teacher suffers a labor's accident and needs to take medical leave, presenting a medical certificate for more than one day will be tabulated as a demerit and will result in a penalty in their meritocracy, keeping them under mental torture. The mental health effects of the teacher's physical health impairment not being able to teach, in addition to natural pains, there is the soul's pain caused by the meritocratic control, reminiscent of the accident of pilot Felipe Massa, when a part thrown by the car in front of him hit his face. When he woke up in the hospital bed, he reacted as if he were still on the track driving the car to qualify his starting time.
c) Because the teacher does not have the right to rest after 9 hours of labor, even though Society (for now, because Constitutional Amendment 103/2019 has already started to abolish its achievements) considers the work of primary and secondary school teachers to be arduous, therefore, granting them special retirement benefits.
d) Because they are invited (through the regimental constraint of the central body of the Secretariats of Education) to submit themselves after 9 hours of labor, during the time that would be to have life as an ordinary person, to countless courses to achieve the bureaucratic, unilateral, meritocratic goals of performance management, reminiscent of the cynicism of bosses when faced with the hardships of employees' overwhelming workload. They often ask: What do you do from midnight to six in the morning?
e) Because after 9 hours of labor and an additional hour of course, it's still not enough. The teacher needs to update system records and, of course, prepare lessons for the next day, which will keep them occupied for at least another 2 hours of labor, extending into the night. Classes have to meet the centralizing determinations that produce media effects for corporate merchandisign, as the teacher's autonomy in the classroom has long been buried.
f) Because the enormous workload imposed by a centralizing and bureaucratic regime disguised with the politically correct but painful name "meritocracy" imposes an effective workload of 11 hours a day, 5 days a week on each teacher subjected to this regime. This is not enough, forcing the teacher to compromise their weekly rest, on the weekend, taking care of details they couldn't resolve in the daily rush or anticipating the workload for the next week.
g) Because managers, without the preparation of private corporations' doctrine in decentralized management, oriented to follow a centralizing-bureaucratic model, under the corporate language "I have to do my job", show no concern with human capital, executing everything within the bureaucratic script to meet goals and "best management practices" rites, at the cost of destroying all the teacher's dreams and professionalism, imposing subjective, unethical, and degrading evaluations without any constraints on the effects of moral harassment.
Conclusion
a) On the loss of the public duty of Pedagogical Teaching
There are exhaustive labordays, or hard days, under degrading conditions imposed by the state centralizing bureaucracy in the forceps of meritocracy, by the operationalization of evaluation instruments applied without the operators being properly prepared, linked only to the hierarchy of the state's centralizing bureaucratic model, without adherence to the basic principles of ethics in respect for human dignity, like a human capital, in the collaborative process of service production, bringing to reality the demagogy of "something for the english to see" (slavery Colonial-era expression meaning 'simulation'), the principles of the law establishing the regime, Law 16.279/2016 that approved the State Education Plan of São Paulo for the period from 2016 to 2026 in its Art. 2 when it says:
Article 2 - The guidelines of the PEE are:
(…)
II - universalization of school attendance;
III - overcoming educational inequalities, with an emphasis on promoting citizenship and eradicating all forms of discrimination;
IV - improvement of education quality;
VI - promotion of the principle of democratic management of public education;
VII - humanistic, scientific, cultural, and technological promotion of the State and the Country;
VIII - appreciation of education professionals;
IX - promotion of the principles of respect for human rights, ethnic-racial diversity, and socio-environmental sustainability.
We highlight here among the above, that socio-environmental sustainability includes, according to current Jobs Organizations, the labor environment, applying Article 225 of the Federal Constitution which states:
Article 225 of the Federal Constitution, which provides:
Article 225. Everyone has the right to an ecologically balanced environment (including the dignity of the teacher and their autonomy in the exercise of teaching), a common good of the people and essential to a healthy quality of life (including the teacher as a person who also has a life outside of school), making it incumbent upon the Public Power and society to defend and preserve it for present and future generations.
b) of the results of the educational process delivered to society without human development.
The education that the State intends to provide in society, after all, is that each individual must defend their own, "doing their job," sometimes even struggling to defend their egoism through the legalization of weapons, in order to guarantee their profit as a means of "being happy" burying the principles that govern the humanity of the being, in mutual collaboration, solidarity, and a just society.
We say this without any embarrassment, in the face of the increase in the degree of evil, hatred, and barbarism that govern daily life, day-to-day among citizens of any social class, and witnessing extremes such as in the anarchy of Haiti, which has come to be governed by ghettos.
In the government vision’s, within their corporate mentality, this is a lucrative field for fattening political capital, because they will spend enormous hours in campaigns with rhetoric of security policy, with police repression, when they should return to the achievements of human development that education produces.
When the world perceives democracy to be in crisis, especially the European Union, it should reflect:”his is the harvest of seeds we have sown, a bitter reality that echoes the proverb, 'we reap what we sow”.