The World Education Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil
This was a conference on education like no other. 17,000 people took part during four days in October – teachers, students, parents, educationists, activists, from all over Latin America and some from beyond.
Plenary sessions filled the massive indoor sports stadium, and over 200 workshops and special sessions took place, with over 780 talks given. And midway through the conference we all spilled out of the stadium to join a mass march and demonstration with trade unionists and farmers against neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism in education was the theme of the conference. Speakers from all over Latin America, and some from beyond, described their common experiences of cuts in education spending, privatisation, attacks on equality, business management methods, and the dominance of economic interests over educational. This is the daily effect of the policies promoted by the IMF and the World Bank and implemented by national governments.
But this was not just a conference of critiques. Speakers counterposed their own alternative vision that ‘another school is possible’, a vision rooted in the rich experiences of real struggles for a just and democratic education in Latin American countries.
The Forum was organised by the state government of Rio Grande do Sul (RS), in the south of Brazil, and the city council of Porto Alegre, a city of 1.3 million which is the state capital. Both are governed by the Workers Party (the PT).
In January 2001 they organised the World Social Forum, attended by 10,000 people, in opposition to the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. The WSF decided to follow it with the World Education Forum because education is central both to capitalist globalisation and to the struggle against it.
A conference like this would be inconceivable in Europe at present. There is simply nothing like the same level of political consciousness and activity, outside and in education.
The level of networking, and even of shared information, among the left in education across national – and language - boundaries in Europe is very low. And of course there is no equivalent to the PT governments of Porto Alegre and RS (in which Democracia Socialista, the current of Fourth International supporters, is particularly influential).
That makes us all the more vulnerable to the neoliberal agenda that the EC is committed to and European governments are adopting,– led by our own. A first step, however modest, towards a cross-European response is urgently needed.