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Wisconsin Goes
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By Glenn Schmidt
Sun Prairie
The United States played host to more than 1,000 educators from more than 149 countries. We weren't just four delegates from Wisconsin (Mary Bell, Pamela Hill, Patricia Hill, Glenn Schmidt). After all, most of the delegates hadn't heard of such a small place in such a vast country. We were NEA-USA delegates.
The four Wisconsin delegates at Education International’s Congress were (left to right) Mary Bell, Glenn Schmidt, Patricia Hill and Pamela Hill. |
In the sultry heat of a Washington, DC summer we sat through a week of debating, voting, and acculturating ourselves to our fellow members of our international affiliate. We did our best to be proper hosts to our foreign guests, just as they had been for us in previous World Congresses in such places as Zimbabwe, Sweden, and Costa Rica.
At the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, we helped steer the delegates, many of whom had never been to the US before, through such peculiarly American exhibits as Archie Bunker's chair and a Southern lunch counter of racial integration fame.
At one point we stopped to help a Japanese teacher who had been unsuccessfully trying to operate a disposable camera. He apparently had never used one and had stripped all the cardboard from it. Talk about a cultural stereotype being vanquished!
The best part of that evening was sharing a nighttime tour of DC's stunning monuments with newly acquired friends from England. Stories of Lincoln and Jefferson mixed with tales of the Duke of Wellington and Winston Churchill--all in the context of a great city lately being rocked by death in the Capitol and scandal in the Oval Office.
It was a subdued President Clinton who came to speak to us at the end of a very intense week--both for him and for us. Delegates greeted him warmly, many mobbing the stage with their cameras. His remarks were short--about 20 minutes--and touched on the major issues that had filled our debate hall: The dangerous "opportunity gaps between the haves and have-nots"; the tragedy of a world where 32% of all girls are not in school; the enemies and obstructors of public education worldwide.
We had debated 42 resolutions in the course of the week. They dealt with such issues as child labor, children and war, illiteracy, economic development, protection of the right to organize, health, and teacher training.
The discussions took a great deal of concentration to follow because of language and cultural differences. Although English predominated, French, Spanish, and Japanese also were used, with United Nations-style headsets relaying translations of varied reliability from the translators' booth in the back of the hall.
Resolution Number 1, the "Global Campaign to Defend and Enhance Public Education," set the tone for the entire Congress. "Education is the responsibility of the State and it is the State's duty to define the goals and objectives of education systems and to fully fund them," it said in part.
Why even make a statement that suggests that governments need to provide schools for their children? In the developing world it's not unusual to find governments abdicating their educational responsibilities. This is not new. And it is a continuing tragedy.What is new is the widespread attacks on public education in the industrialized nations.
A New Zealand delegate listed catch-phrases used in the worldwide attacks: "local control," "user pays," "vouchers," "privatization," and "choice." She described how an anti-public education government had devastated the schools in New Zealand. Chillingly, she said at one point, "The worst part of the government's policies has been the dramatic growth of the gap between the haves and have-nots. We call this the Americanization of New Zealand's schools."
An Australian delegate talked about the voucher plans and privatization schemes and how they were "leaving public schools as residual systems for the poor."
A Canadian delegate decried the notion that "those who talk about the community are seen as enemies of the individual."
A delegate from the US Virgin Islands noted that education was becoming "subservient to market interests."
While public education may have many enemies worldwide, it also has numerous friends, many who addressed the World Congress. There was Bill Jordan of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions who condemned the "holy trinity" of liberalization, deregulation, and privatization. Katherine Hagen, Director General of the International Labor Organization, enumerated four principles: freedom of association, no child labor, no forced labor, and no discrimination. There was Frederico Mayor from UNESCO, John Sweeney from AFL-CIO, and Hans Englebritz from Public Service Int'l. We even heard from a representative of the World Bank, an institution not generally noted for its sensitivity to the public sector. He asked us to consider the five main change engines currently transforming our world: democracy, market economies, globalization, technology, and changing public and private roles.
Through it all, Education International President Mary Hatwood Futrell, a former NEA president, cooly made allowances for our cultural differences while achieving consensus on most issues.
Even she had to be amused, however, when EI succeeded in bringing together delegates from India and Pakistan, the bitterest of enemies on the world scene. The resolution we were considering condemned both countries for conducting nuclear tests earlier this year. Since neither country wished to be singled out in this way, delegates from both countries rose to support each others' attempts to defeat the resolution. It passed.
What is Education International and What Does It Do?
Besides getting together every three years in a World Congress, Education International spends much of its time and influence trying to make the global educational atmosphere better for teachers and students, often amid conditions we would find appalling.
While the World Congress was in session, Joanne Eide, NEA's head of international relations, demonstrated how members of the global educational community support each other in a very tangible way.
She went to the White House with the Ethiopian delegates to EI to meet with Mickey Ibarra, the administration's Assistant for Intergovernmental Relations (and a former NEA member). Also present at the meeting were representatives from the State Department, EI, and the National Security Council.
They discussed EI's concerns about Ethiopia, including a pay freeze for teachers, the disenfranchisement of the Ethiopian Teachers Association, and the confiscation of resources and pensions. Their most pressing concern was for the lack of a timely trial for the teachers association president, who has been in jail for two years now because of various and changing charges. Another union official was killed while "resisting arrest" according to the Ethiopion government.
What will come of the White House meeting in the short run is unclear, but in the long run, the ability to acquire and disseminate vital information on a global scale and work together with national governments gives EI credibility and influence that educators have never before had internationally.
Posted October 2, 1998
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