Education is one of the last spaces where society accepts the "Father State." We want the Ministry to be strict, standardized, and reliable because we are terrified of the messiness of freedom.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw the limits of radical horizontality. Countries with strong, centralized Ministries (Uruguay, Costa Rica) rolled out remote learning infrastructure in weeks. Countries with fragmented, "autonomous" school systems devolved into chaos, with rich schools zooming and poor schools disappearing.
Further Reading: "Calibán y la Bruja" (Federici) on the body politics of education; The Zapatista Escuelitas for a real-world model of autonomous education.
Autogestión argues that messiness is the actual curriculum. It argues that a child learning to resolve a dispute in a school assembly is more valuable than memorizing the date of the Battle of Ayacucho.
When the person signing your paycheck is also the person who cleans the erasers at the end of the week, the power dynamic shifts. It becomes uncomfortable. It becomes real. Let’s be blunt: Autogestión at the scale of a Ministry is a recipe for paralysis.
But across Latin America, from the CGT ’s influence in Argentina to the CNTE ’s radical unionism in Mexico, the demand for autogestión del Ministerio de Educación is no longer a fringe anarchist fantasy. It is a practical, albeit chaotic, political proposal.
Education is one of the last spaces where society accepts the "Father State." We want the Ministry to be strict, standardized, and reliable because we are terrified of the messiness of freedom.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw the limits of radical horizontality. Countries with strong, centralized Ministries (Uruguay, Costa Rica) rolled out remote learning infrastructure in weeks. Countries with fragmented, "autonomous" school systems devolved into chaos, with rich schools zooming and poor schools disappearing.
Further Reading: "Calibán y la Bruja" (Federici) on the body politics of education; The Zapatista Escuelitas for a real-world model of autonomous education.
Autogestión argues that messiness is the actual curriculum. It argues that a child learning to resolve a dispute in a school assembly is more valuable than memorizing the date of the Battle of Ayacucho.
When the person signing your paycheck is also the person who cleans the erasers at the end of the week, the power dynamic shifts. It becomes uncomfortable. It becomes real. Let’s be blunt: Autogestión at the scale of a Ministry is a recipe for paralysis.
But across Latin America, from the CGT ’s influence in Argentina to the CNTE ’s radical unionism in Mexico, the demand for autogestión del Ministerio de Educación is no longer a fringe anarchist fantasy. It is a practical, albeit chaotic, political proposal.