The DISY government is dangerous for education as well
Statement by AKEL C.C. Spokesperson Giorgos Koukoumas
20 October 2022, AKEL C.C. Press Office, Nicosia
On the education front, the neoliberal obsessions of the ruling DISY party are once again clashing with the interests of education as a social good and of children, teachers and society as a whole. In all the open issues of the day in education, the government chooses to dismantle the public school system and hand it over piece by piece to the private sector. It chooses to show contempt for the teaching profession and undermine labour relations. More specifically:
- Instead of expanding compulsory public pre-primary education, the government is content to subsidize private kindergartens with vouchers.
- Instead of respecting the decisions of Parliament and court rulings, it prevents the safeguarding of permanent teachers and continues to keep teachers in full-day and nursery programmes on the purchase of services system by curbing and curtailing their rights and incomes.
- Instead of building on the institution of the MIEEK’s (Post-secondary Institutes of Vocational Education and Training), which by all accounts have had excellent results with the unified planning of the state, the government is preparing to privatise them under the guise of so-called “autonomy”.
In other words, the same philosophy that guided them in the closure of the Cyprus Co-operative Bank, in the selloff of semi-governmental organisations, in the undermining of the social character of the National Health Scheme (GESY), apparently guides them in education as well: “privatise everything”. All this is happening, under the leadership of a Minister of Education who sealed his term of office with his incompetence, authoritarianism and ideological obsessions. The DISY government is dangerous for education as well. That is precisely why it must go.
