By Eugenio Montesino, on August 22, 2024
Javier Milei’s government is de funding public education.
The current reduction of funding for university education is part of a model that despises knowledge and promotes labor precariousness, stripping the country of its scientific and cultural potential.
University education is not a priority when from the National Executive Power decisions are made that defund it and thus contribute to its social, economic and political degradation. The impoverishment is achieved not only through the delay of the increases in the budget allocations essential for the survival of the university education system, but also through campaigns that try to discredit public education.
By reinserting us into the international division of labor under a model of economic-productive primarization in line with the spirit of the Basic Law, a low-skilled labor force with minimal professional training requirements is required. These jobs are easy to replace, which gives the employer greater capacity to impose his conditions of maximum labor intensity and low wages reaching survival wages.
An extractivist economy is based on the intensive and indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources , generally destined for export, with little or no processing or value added, so that their sale price is low. This is even more so when compared to the value assigned to them once they have been processed and transformed, a link in the chain generally carried out in importing or developed countries that use them in their industrial activities, generating goods with high sales value.
It is along this path that the current policy of defunding the national public university sector is deepening, observed as unnecessary in its current dimension for an extractivist and primarized model of our economy.
The models that primarize the economy with a low level of processing and value added to those materials to export them to industrialized countries and then sell them already processed with high economic value added, require national professional labor trained on a very low scale or quantity. The transnational companies import the technological capacity to carry out the productive tasks, they bring the high executives and specialized technicians that direct the productive processes, generally from their countries of origin. Among the sectors most conducive to deepening this economic model are mining, oil, agriculture and fishing, among others.
Without a quality public university with free access, only those who can afford to pay for it through the private university system designed for the interests of reduced and elitist sectors of society would have the possibility of attending higher education. It would also waste the scientific and technical potential of sectors of the population who, unable to access university education, would not have the opportunity to develop and apply their talents in a higher system of study and training, nor contribute to the welfare of society. Most of the scientists that our country has produced, recognized both nationally and internationally, have come from public education.
Culture, also under attack
In a society with a lower level of education, general instruction and culture, it is easier to commit social, political and economic injustices. Under these conditions, society is more easily influenced and dominated. Education contributes to raise the critical vision of the models applied in the social, economic and political sphere of our society.
An example of this is the recent reform of the financing system for film production, where the State significantly reduces its economic contribution to the development of national cinema despite its extraordinary cultural success both nationally and internationally.
Cultural and artistic expressions have an intangible value for society and although sometimes these activities do not produce financial gains, trying to bring to this sector business rules where what does not leave economic benefits is closed, would generate profound consequences in many aspects of national culture.
This reasoning responds to a process of colonization of a culture based on private monetary gain that prioritizes economic profit above all other motives.
At the end of 1997, a decade of strong neoliberal reforms in Argentina, Leonardo Molelo published an article in defense of low salaries in Argentine education. He said that these meager salaries increase general culture and the circulation of knowledge. Thanks to these low salaries, a professor who teaches brain surgery in the morning can enrich his culture, and the culture of others, by making photocopies in the afternoon, just as an assistant professor of molecular biology is in optimal conditions to take advantage of his training by working as a plumber and car painter.
Eduardo Galeano reminded us in La escuela del mundo al revés. The more educated, more culturally qualified and skilled sectors of society question social injustices with a higher level of argumentation and are also the sectors in the best conditions to guide, contribute to and lead the transformations of these realities and lead society towards levels of greater economic progressiveness and justice. As sociology expresses, these social strata have the offer of leadership to the masses.
Education as an expense
Public resources to finance education are considered by business and political sectors as an unnecessary expense and not as an investment. They also consider them to generate a greater tax burden. However, there are different visions of this approach that consider that the value that is created and therefore also the source of all taxes comes from the work and effort of the labor performed and delivered by workers.
Other positions consider that this educational expenditure is really an investment that promotes the productive and cultural development of future generations of people who will enter the labor market with better professional skills and better trained to contribute more efficiently to business and national development. They would also contribute their knowledge and more diverse and professional visions to the building of a better society.
Capitalism does not need cultivated men and women, but men trained in an ultra-specific field who adjust to the productive scheme without questioning it, wrote Karl Marx.
Eugenio Montesino, is a Professor at UBA and UNQ in Economics and Taxation.
Source: Pagina 12