Autogestión argues that messiness is the actual curriculum. It argues that a child learning to resolve a dispute in a school assembly is more valuable than memorizing the date of the Battle of Ayacucho.
Can a Ministry practice autogestión ? No. The moment it does, it stops being a Ministry. And maybe—just maybe—that is the point.
This is the paradox: You have to dismantle the server. The Three Pillars of Educational Autogestion If a Ministry were serious about devolving power, it wouldn’t just “consult” stakeholders. It would dissolve itself into a logistics hub. Based on historical experiments (from the Spanish Revolution’s schools to the Escuelas Libres of Argentina), here are the three non-negotiables: autogestion del ministerio de educacion
When the person signing your paycheck is also the person who cleans the erasers at the end of the week, the power dynamic shifts. It becomes uncomfortable. It becomes real. Let’s be blunt: Autogestión at the scale of a Ministry is a recipe for paralysis.
So, what would a Ministry of Education that practices autogestión actually look like? And more importantly, can it work? The Ministry of Education is, by definition, a tool of the State. Its primary functions are to distribute funding, enforce national standards, certify learning, and suppress variation. Autogestión , conversely, argues that the people doing the work (teachers, students, janitors, parents) should control the conditions of that work. Autogestión argues that messiness is the actual curriculum
There is a specific thrill—or perhaps a specific absurdity—in typing the words “self-management” and “Ministry” into the same sentence. On the surface, they are ideological enemies. A Ministry is hierarchy: vertical, standardized, and accountable to the State. Autogestión is horizontal, localized, and accountable only to the collective.
When teachers in Oaxaca block the Zócalo, they aren’t asking for a new textbook. They are asking for the abolition of the bureaucratic approval process for local curricula. They want the poder (power) to decide, without a Director General signing off on it. This is the paradox: You have to dismantle the server
During the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw the limits of radical horizontality. Countries with strong, centralized Ministries (Uruguay, Costa Rica) rolled out remote learning infrastructure in weeks. Countries with fragmented, "autonomous" school systems devolved into chaos, with rich schools zooming and poor schools disappearing.
