Day 0

By Marco Esteban Mendoza  

Prologue to 124 Years of Building a Utopia. More than a century ago, a young rural teacher began his teaching career. Celestin Freinet faced the challenges of an educational practice deeply influenced by a rigid school system that clung to its religious roots. Through trial and reflection, he realized that pedagogical transformation lay within those students who, with their indifference, resistance, and imagination, were covertly developing mechanisms to survive in school. Cooperation was one of the first principles he vigorously promoted. Classroom life took on a new dimension when teacher-centered work gave way to an approach where everyone (he worked only with boys in those early years) played a leading role. Cooperation in the classroom expanded to the teaching community. Freinet understood that the success of his educational proposal could not be an isolated experience. He persuaded, invited, and promoted his techniques, and thus the project grew like a snowball.

124 years later, teachers from more than 20 countries gather in a state where cooperation, through *tequio* and *guelaguetza*, is deeply rooted in communal culture. Freinet has been reinterpreted by hundreds of teachers, and the Mexican Movement for Modern School has played an important role, without diminishing the importance of the many colleagues who, independently, have spread his ideas in Verde Antequera. From the City of Resistance, teachers arrive from Ghana, Burkina Faso, Togo, Cameroon, Senegal, Chile, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Canada, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Poland, Japan, and other places that I can't recall at the moment. They have arrived with their suitcases, and their faces express surprise, excitement, and enthusiasm, as well as, in some cases, anxiety, concern, and unease upon arriving in a country they imagined as the stereotypical images of a colonized Mexico (partly because, in one way or another, these lands have always had a permanent refusal to be subordinate) or upon discovering the millions of inhabitants who populate these hills, ravines, coasts, valleys, forests, mountains, perpetual ice, deserts, mangroves, medians, overpasses, basements, and streets.

For nearly a month, Katrien Nijs from Belgium and Andi Honegger have begun a journey through ten public and community schools of the MMEM. With their own reservations and ways of understanding Freinet, they express satisfaction in seeing how the children and young people in preschools, rural and urban primary schools, and public and community secondary schools live with these MMEM teachers a new way of schooling. Thus, from Apoala, Jaltepec (both in Oaxaca), Totoapita La Herradura (Hidalgo), Barrio Nuevo, Los Héroes 3rd Section (Ecatepec, State of Mexico), Chimalhuacán (State of Mexico), Milpa Alta, Ajusco Medio, La Peralvillo, and Miravalle, they are transforming classrooms into living utopias. This first advance is the vanguard of this Day 0, the day preceding the International Meeting of Freinet Educators grouped in the International Federation of Freinet Movements (FIMEM).

Like anarchist ants (that is, working collectively though without following a single path), they contribute to showing the dignity of a teaching profession that, from public, community, and private schools, took on the organization of a RIDEF that arose more from linguistic provocation than from the analysis and consensus of the two Freinet movements in Mexico (MMEM and MEPA, the Alternative Education Popular Movement of the Alternative Education Network). Here, in the City of Antequera, we run from one side to another, set up tables, transport colleagues, arrange spaces, joke, laugh, eat, love, and also use the bathroom and shower daily (je, we notice that Europeans don't like to do it every day). Despite the affection, Montezuma's revenge wreaks havoc on the stomachs of Freinet teachers from other worlds. Despite the love for the cuisine, the effects do not delay. When we meet at the Moisés Sáenz secondary school or on the surrounding streets of El Llano, the faces of these colleagues, even if they are Swiss and German, are filled with smiles, and their eyes shine with excitement.

Here, with pride and dignity, we begin another RIDEF, RIDEF Oaxaca 2024. So if you want to learn and are interested, you are invited. This Monday, August 5th, in the afternoon, you can attend a short workshop or our Pedagogical Fair.