By Michael Karadjis
ATHENS — Thousands of teachers and students blocked the city on September 4 in the first action of what promises to be a long campaign against the government's education "poly legislation".
The centrepiece of this legislation is the abolition of the current system whereby teachers who finish their training are put on a waiting list for full-time employment. In practice, the system has been a disaster because teachers wait for years to be employed.
"I've waited 15 years, and I was sure it was my turn this year [the Greek school year begins in September]. Now who knows?", said Costas Yiannalopoulos, a prospective science teacher. There are currently 120,000 teachers on the waiting list.
Rather than speed up the employment of teachers by creating more teaching positions and reducing class sizes, the PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement) government of Costas Simitis has opted to replace seniority with a system of exams in which those on the list compete with those just finishing a teaching degree.
Supposedly, this is to judge whether fully trained teachers can do the job they were trained for! It implies that those left out for years due to the shambles of the Greek education system are now "incapable".
In reality, these teachers have spent their waiting years working as casual teachers, or working in the massive system of private colleges, the frontistiria.
An immediate demand of education workers is to reduce class sizes from the current 40 to no more than 25. To cover this, and to fix up the generally disastrous state of education, would require the employment of 40,000 new teachers. The current new year intake is only 4000.
The teachers further demand that education spending be raised from 7% of the national budget (the lowest in Europe) to 15%.
Lurking behind the government's alleged search for "better" teachers is the desire for greater political control over education workers.
The second point in the poly legislation proposes the introduction of a new system of constant inspection of teachers. Teachers will be judged by their "performance" in a situation of enormous class sizes, school buildings in a state of disrepair and textbooks ridiculously out of date.
A body of 400 bureaucrats will carry out this inspection at a cost of 6 billion drachma (A$30 million). Each exam for teacher employment will cost 3 billion drachma.
The government is hiding its legislation behind rhetoric about a more "open" education. However, this is simply a cover for opening up the system for user pays.
The legislation includes the introduction of fees for university students over the age of 25. Given that many working-class students have to work part time to afford their studies, many will be well over 25 when they complete their degrees.
Even now, the state of schools makes basic education expensive — each year, parents spend 400 billion drachma on frontistiria to help their children through school.
Since coming to power last year, the Simitis government has pushed radical neo-liberal economic policies. Privatisation is accelerating, tight austerity aims to hold wage growth at 3% (despite far higher inflation — the highest in Europe), while taxes on profits are deemed "far too high" at 35% and are about to be slashed — for those companies that pay any tax, that is.
In contrast, "defence" spending is being massively expanded under a $45 billion, five-year program as part of the permanent Greek-Turkish rivalry in the Aegean and the growing Greek role in the Balkans.
The education minister, Gerasimos Arsenis, has long been considered one of the "populist left" of PASOK, loyal to the social democratic traditions of the party's founder, Andreas Papandreou. However, not only is Arsenis leading the attack on education, but his wing of PASOK has completely dropped its opposition to Simitis' direction.
Instead, its populist image has been reduced to a reactionary Greek nationalist opposition to Simitis' more rational "soft" line on "national issues" related to Turkey, Cyprus and Macedonia, a line dictated not be internationalism but by the needs of European capitalist integration.
Meanwhile, the teachers' union is promising Arsenis a long, hot winter.