Pedro Ambriz grew up in the Mexican state of Michoacan and has remained there as a lifelong teacher. He’s also been a long-time local leader of the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación, the CNTE, the radical alternative to the old-guard Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación, the SNTE. Teacher activists like Ambriz are fighting for an education system that prioritizes the happiness of every single child they teach.
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As a child yourself, how did your own education go? Did your school experience make you want to become a teacher?
My family had a lot of trouble affording the books I needed. But my dedicated — and class-conscious — teachers believed that children like me from poor families should get as good an education as they could give.
I did have some bad experiences too. Some of my teachers made fun of me, called me “fat.” That really hurt. But I understood that children had no more important people in their lives than teachers. After high school, I went to a teachers college, and I’ve been a teacher ever since 1995.
Neoliberalism hit the world in the 1980s. México’s President Salinas de Gortari began introducing “reforms” right before you began teaching. What did those “reforms”do?
The changes began under Salinas and got worse under Zedillo and worst of all under Peña-Nieto. From 1988 to 2018 we suffered from the privatization of transportation and health services. Those presidents considered all public services bad.
Peña-Nieto had the slogan “Quality Education.” What a lie! His exam that people had to pass to become a teacher had questions that had nothing to with what and how teachers needed to teach. His expanded education budget went to advertising, to tell the country how wonderful his reforms were working. He should have been making sure every school had electricity and running water or that all children had notebooks and pencils. His reforms created an education of worse quality!
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How did teachers respond to the reforms?
We resisted. I’ve been active for a long time in our fighting union, the CNTE. We had demonstrations and strikes in our local areas, particularly in México’s four poorest states, in the south.
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We also had massive demonstrations in México City to take our grievances directly to the federal government. Teachers went without salaries for months. We had teachers having to sell tostadas on the street. I played the guitar for local events. Our wives and children worked too, cobbling together any money we could.
We teachers have been fighting now for thirty years. For resisting, we were threatened, disappeared, and killed. Resisting become a matter of life and death. In the media, people like Carlos Loret de Mola on Televisa blamed teachers for poverty and misery since, he said, we just refused to work.
Your school didn’t only reject neoliberalism. You created a radical educational model!
I’ve taught at this alternative school for five years now. We named the school after the revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magón, and we’re making a revolution in education! We call our program “Democratic and Cultural Alternatives in Michoacan.”
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For starters, we’ve broken the traditional relations of power. We have no director or principal. Every year, parents, students, and teachers select a coordinator. We follow the participatory teaching approaches of the great educational philosopher Paolo Freire. He believed that knowledge grows from the lives students live and from teachers’ life experiences too. We call this “transversal” education. We don’t see knowledge as coming from the top down or from just a set of facts.
In our curriculum we emphasize histories of resistance and revolution against unjust systems. Our analysis rests on dialectical materialism, on the idea that something new comes out of opposing forces, and that new thing becomes the basis for the next cycle of change. We consider history fundamental to our curriculum. From pre-school through high school all children learn the same things, but in ways appropriate to their stage of development.
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Pre-schoolers, for instance, learn about the lives of revolutionary heroes like Emilio Zapata, Pancho Villa, and Ricardo Magón. At the primary level, we add in the background. What kind of work did people do? What about women? How did people support their leaders? In secondary school, we go deeper. What did the Revolution accomplish?
Our school ranks as the poorest in our region, but the community considers the school to be its own. Our school doors are always open, and teachers and parents work together to tackle drugs and other community problems.
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AMLO vowed to end neoliberal education policies. Have things changed?
The educational system still has a lot of the features from Peña-Nieto’s time. We see the system’s teacher evaluations as a capitalist initiative to shame teachers, and we demand that they be ended. We support a different kind of evaluation that would help teachers learn where and how to improve their skills.
Do our schools today have all the supplies they need? No, parents must still dig into their own pockets. Scholarships? Some of my students are orphans or very poor. They get up at 3 a.m. to go to work making bricks or at 5 to make bread or collect trash to recycle before school. They need more than a pencil.
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At a parade honoring the Mexican Revolution. Pedro Ambriz, his son, and another student advocated for “less ‘Face’ and more book!” and blasted television’s impact. Pedro’s votes-in-a-wastebasket sign illustrated the Mexican Election Commission’s corruption.
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We don’t look to the government for support. We count on our union as the structure that best backs us.
How would you describe your teaching philosophy?
First and foremost, kids need love. I treat the students with me as my children. Kids should be happy at school. They shouldn’t be afraid to make mistakes. They need to learn to love themselves. With an education system built around these principles, all students can gain what they need for a good life not just for themselves, but for everyone.
You’re working with the Trinational Coalition to Defend Public Education. How does international solidarity help educators in all three countries?
The Trinational brings teachers together as one family. It helps us become sisters and brothers, to understand we’re not alone, that many teachers like us in and out of our country are fighting for dignity and respect.
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We don’t see education as just a book. It’s people joining together for the transformation of society. Education is about sisterhood, about concern for the person in front of you and the person to your side. Education promotes the dignity of every person, at every level of society.
Our 1814 Mexican Constitution says we have the right to be happy. That happiness needs to begin with the children. And teachers, through love, can guarantee this most valuable of rights.
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