Getting to them while they're young

Photo by Eric Jackson

Teaching them while they're still young

If you want any sort of social change in Panama, you usually need to start by convincing the youngsters. Spay Panama is one of the groups that's trying to get Panamanians to treat animals more kindly, and its founder Pat Chan has always maintained that although the narrow mission is to spay or neuter as many dogs and cats as possible so that fewer of them end up abandoned and living on the streets, educating people about how to properly care for a pet in particular and the ethical treatment of animals in general is a big part of what the organization does. At a Spay Panama clinic in the Panama Oeste community of El Higo, this little girl, shown here with a kitty recovering from surgery, got the essential message.

Sadly, this is not the universal norm with kids these days. Quite simply, Panama's public primary and secondary education system is in shambles, the national university that exercises control over all other institutions of higher learning is a national disgrace, and the whole country seems to be dumbing down.

For a long time, our education woes have been a problem for most employers. Yes, the leftist teachers' unions have their well founded critiques. But conservative employers also have their reasons to complain, because they find it hard to attract and keep competent employees. An education system that leaves it up to employers to teach the people whom they hire to do their jobs is the norm in many places, but here in Panama things have sunk below that level, to the point that there are way too many kids coming into the job market with pieces of paper calling them high school graduates, yet who are functionally illiterate or innumerate, or both. It's hard to train someone who can't read or do simple math.

Add to that day in, day out vexation for employers the acute problems of the moment. The outgoing Torrijos regime has embezzled, paid friends and relatives for work not done, or otherwise looted the public school system to the point that many school buildings are unfit for use. Parents, teachers and students are doing what is usually done when such situations arise in this country --- blocking the roads. So woe to the executive who has to get across town for a business meeting, or move merchandise from point A to point B. The street blockade may be a part of our national political culture, but it's a totally disruptive one.

I was never a model student, but I was generally a good student. I have taught here and there, though I never systematically studied teaching. I've been a politician and an activist on both winning and losing sides, and one of the diplomas of which I am possessed says that I know something about political science. I don't have a high school diploma but I do have a doctoral degree. I have been educated at public and private institutions. I have had to make decisions about hiring people, and have worked with student interns. All of these aspects of where I have been and what I have done in my lifetime, and what I have observed over these past 15 years in Panama, lead me to make some radical in the original sense (down to the roots) but not so wild conclusions about some changes Panama needs in its educational system. Some of the key points are:

This country needs to train and hire a lot more teachers for the public schools, and build a lot more schools, so that kids will be in school for full days. In general, Panamanians kids need to put more time into studying, both in the classroom and doing homework.
The forces of militant ignorance somehow find teachers tempting targets, and can be counted on to blame the teachers and their unions for all of the education system's faults. But at the risk of making a certain anti-intellectual segment of society froth at the mouth, it really is in the interest of students and society to ease a bit of the teachers' workload by having smaller class sizes. This again requires the hiring of more teachers.
The teacher bashers thus resisted, it's still true that too many of our teachers are not very well educated themselves. The system of seminars for which certificates of attendance are awarded is an ineffective and often corrupt way of continuing teacher education. We need universities set up for lifelong education that keeps professionals up to date in their fields and allows them to explore other subjects. We need to subsidize foreign language teachers' vacations and study courses in places where the languages they teach are what people speak. We need to give those who are teaching arts, crafts and sciences the occasional sabbatical to make practical use of their skills.
We need a world class library in this country. The Internet is wonderful, but it's not a substitute for a decent library. Actually, the Internet would be an important part of any world class library, which would not only be a place where millions of books, recordings and documents in a number of different languages are systematically stored in a way that allows people to browse through the stacks, but also a center in which things are translated, scanned and entered into electronic databases.
We need to do many things to foster a reading culture, especially among kids. The important thing is not so much to make them read what the teacher assigns --- although that is important --- but to convince them at an early age that reading is fun, is their right, and is a constant pastime that will take them where their interests lead them.
Let's face it: for many an adolescent boy and many a young man, rioting in the streets is fun. Adding a serious social, economic or political cause enhances the testosterone rush. If you want fewer street blockages in front of the university, you need to provide another physical outlet for that energy, but more importantly you need to provide a more rational outlet for that activism. Our electoral system that's limited to across the board contests for everything every five years is a bad idea on many counts, and one of the main ones is that in between elections people have few opportunities to make their voices heard. Give the president a once in a lifetime six-year term and make the legislators stand for re-election (or not) every two years, and elect other people to local, educational and legal system posts in odd-numbered years and all of a sudden there are better things to do about an annoying government than blocking the street.
We need to break up the University of Panama, strip it of its control over other institutions, do a liposuction on its administration and end its political patronage games. The shorn provincial branches of the national university should be allowed to merge with other institutions. They should be encouraged to seek their own special niches and identities. If some of them are to be two-year, vocational-oriented schools, we need those too.

I'm not holding my breath waiting for the Martinelli administration to do what I suggest, but I don't think that the sorts of things I suggest would conflict with, for example, an Opus Dei education minister trying to impose Jesuit standards on public instruction or a conservative government trying to stop spending money on stupid things. But what I suggest would require more sacrifices by everyone in society --- harder work for students, more tax money raised and spent to lengthen the school day and improve the quality of education.

Miguel Antonio Bernal addresses law students at a protest against the university rector with the fake doctorate's move to fire him for unwanted criticism. Photo by Eric Jackson

One reason why I am not holding my breath waiting for education reforms is there there are more important players than me, who have far different agendas. Dogmatic capitalist or communist schemes, dictatorial powers for sordid administrators, lifetime sinecures for superfluous political appointees, public contracts for friends and relatives who couldn't comply even if they intended to do so, getting by with as little work as possible and no creative thinking at all --- these are the sorts of agendas.

Ricardo Martinelli says he wants to involve businesses in public education and that's not necessarily a bad idea. If he means privatization of the public schools by that we will learn soon enough and there will justifiably be a great hue and cry throughout the land. However, I don't think that's what he intends.

There needs to be a great public movement to rescue Panamanian education, and this idea that only parents with kids in public schools have a stake is a fallacy that needs to be rejected out of hand. Everyone who lives in this society has a stake.

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By the way, I have had occasion to deal with a fair amount of international aid agency and financial institution rhetoric from time to time, and one of the terms of art, often used in nefarious ways, is the word "stakeholder." The first concept that this word brings to my mind is the brave person who, with the mob of peasants with torches and pitchforks looking on and the one who wields the mallet standing by, holds the sharpened wooden shaft over Count Dracula's heart. But in the perverse rhetoric used in certain circles, the corporation that would like to take over some public function is a "stakeholder," and a more important one than, for example, those who perform or depend upon that public function.

* * *

Now comes the time for all of us to educate ourselves about who stands for what, the proper names for political phenomena and the nature of democracy. In Honduras, the elected president fired the top-ranking army general, the supreme court ruled that the army command is not subject to civilian control and the soldiers moved in to oust President Zelaya, arrest many of his cabinet members and other supporters, shut down all media except those which support them, and install a pliant legislature as the front man for a military regime. In the United States, Republican notables, right-wing publications' editorial pages and the Miami Cuban exile leadership hailed the coup and condemned President Obama for siding with Latin American "dictators" who oppose it.

Well, yes. Raúl Castro is a dictator, and he opposes the coup. But the "dictator" most often mentioned in the GOP diatribes is the elected president of Venezuela. Virtually every head of state in Latin American, including right-wing leaders like Mexico's President Calderón, has denounced the Honduran coup.

The United States has many levers it can pull to reverse the coup, but President Obama has, like the wily Chicago politician that he is, moved cautiously. He and Secretary of State Clinton denounced the new regime as illegitimate and reiterated their support for Zelaya.

The Honduran people are weighing in on this subject. The taxi drivers and utility workers were the first to walk out in a growing national strike. Army units in the north mutinied against the coup leaders. Protesters set up multiple burning barricades on virtually every important road in the country.

As a line of riot cops fled a mob of stone-throwing young men near the presidential palace, a young woman with that aristocratic look about her stepped forward and slugged one of the cops in the face. That the cops didn't fire on the young men or return the young woman's punch appears to be a sign that the troops called out for the coup don't want to do anything that might get them thrown in jail in the likely event that the coup fails.

So does this validate the University of Panama's campus radicals and their frequent street blockades? I don't think so. Warfare, rioting in the streets and so on are sometimes necessary to defend democracy and fundamental freedoms --- but not really all that often. Violence may be a testosterone rush, especially when mob psychology kicks in, but it's degrading to all involved and innocent people tend to get hurt. Warmongering right-wing politicians and left-wing students who know of no political tactic other than rioting in the streets are two sides of the same coin, opposing forces that require each other for their validation and very existence.

Meanwhile, does support for the restoration of the elected Honduran president mean that one has to support everything he does? Only to sycophants and those with doctrinaire minds. Certainly the new constitution upon which Hondurans were scheduled to vote scared the hell out of the army, the courts and the traditional politicians, and the possibility of presidential re-election was only a minor part of it. Was the Honduran Supreme Court's ruling that the president is subject to the veto of the military well grounded in Honduran law? Well, then, that's Exhibit A for the proposition that the country needs a new constitution.

However, the compulsion toward presidential re-election in Latin American "Pink Tide" constitutional reforms strikes me as a weakness, a continuation of the personalism that runs through the region's political history. To get the systemic changes we need, Latin America needs a generation of brilliant leaders who build enduring majorities for the progressive things they do rather than a generation of charismatic new caudillos who inspire personal loyalty.

For most Latin American presidents, however, Zelaya's fate is not about left versus right, personal ambition versus selfless public service, or yes or no on a constitutional referendum. It's about whether the soldiers and cops are servants of, or masters of, our nations. Today it might be US-trained right-wing officers in Honduras deposing a leftist president, but tomorrow it could be a Norieguista cabal in the Panama's National Police ousting an elected right-wing president. Despite the pronouncements from Miami, we don't need any of that.

* * *

Gathering for another rainy Gay Pride observance. Photo by José F. Ponce

I went to American schools during the Cold War, and they taught us all of this rhetoric about freedom and democracy. However, the differences between these two concepts were never well explained and no teacher who wanted to keep his or her job would talk about the contradictions between these principles and what the US government was doing in Vietnam.

Democracy is about a majority, after a thorough discussion of the issues and personalities involved, and given choices that represent the various currents of thinking in socieity, deciding who will run the government and what sorts of policies they will have to apply if they care to keep their mandates.

Freedom is about an individual or group of individuals, notwithstanding what the majority might think, being allowed to live according to his, her or their own principles and moreover, if in the minority, to try to convince enough people of the soundness of their ideas so as to create a new majority.

Freedom and democracy often conflict, and as a practical matter neither can be practiced in absolute terms.

Take a democratic vote, and the minority whose sexual orientation attracts them to people of the same gender might well be stripped of all rights. But just as every society has a certain minority of people who naturally tend to prefer the use of their left hands over their right hands and an even smaller minority of ambidextrous individuals, gay men, lesbians and bisexuals are everywhere and they are tired of being treated as perverts or criminals. Notwithstanding widely held stereotypes and the doctrines of churches and sometimes the state, members of this minority want the freedom to be who they are without having to put up with harassment, defamation or discrimination about it.

And thus Panama's organization that defends the rights, interests and liberties of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people, the Association of New Men and Women of Panama (AHMNP), congregated at the usual place for its annual Gay Pride observance and the awarding of the Pink Egg. The winner of that dubious distinction as Panama's worst homophobe went collectively to the La Cascara television program, for broadcasting stereotypes that the gay community considers obnoxious.

* * *

Inés Azpúrua, José Mezquita, Varoon Anand and Nick Miles improvise. Photo by Eric Jackson

So is there anything fun to do?

Well, the younger generation of the Theatre Guild of Ancon filled the little wooden theater for six nights of improvisation --- the most impressive turnout in many years.

If you are adventurous enough to cross a now far more dangerous Avenida Balboa, you might go the the new park facilities on the recently opened Cinta Costera. (But bring drinking water and an umbrella, because this hyper-expensive project created park areas without drinking fountains or very much shade.)

You might want to read the comics, or do The Panama News Quote Acrostic.

You might want to leave it to Hillary Clinton to stare down two-bit military juntas, and stay home and bake oatmeal mango cookies.

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The Panama News Editors

Editor & Publisher - Eric Jackson
Contributing Editor - Silvio Sirias
Contributing Editor - José F. Ponce
Copy Editor - Sue Hindman