Salamanca Statement done by the International Workgroup during the Social Forum for Education and Culture.

The Salamanca Social Forum for Education and Culture joins the Campaign Against Capital's Europe since we consider that the neoliberal policies promoted by the European Union being applied to our educational system is producing, amongst other effects, the following consequences:

- Each day more schools and universities are being privatized.
- Tuition is being incorporated or increased.
- The fundamental right to a quality education depends more and more on economic factors.
- The democratic rights of organizing and expression of students are being reduced and repressed.
- We are taught more every time what the multinational corporations want and not what society needs.

That is why, after an analysis of the different current educational systems, as well as, various alternative experiences from the official education, we want:

** Education to be a universal good, openly accessible and free to all levels, for all.

** An increase in financing in order to construct a secular quality public education that is self-administrated and that is respectful with all cultures,

** An equal level of quality and financing amongst all the educational centers without fostering competitiveness amongst them, avoiding the formation of elite centers,

** The structures of administration and of representation in the educational centers to be organized according to a direct democratic participation, in which the decisions take a horizontal form and not a top to bottom one,

** An education for society and not for the corporations that should respect the autonomy of the educational centers and not foster the hyper-specialization in benefit of exclusively economic criteria,

** To establish a system of degrees and title recognition on an International level, without entailing a homogenization of the educational programs. We reject the current credit transfer system that does not respect the different educational realities,

** The fostering of student and teaching staff mobility by organizing realistic systems of economic support and improving the relations between educational centers on an International level,

** An education that empowers research with social ends avoiding the direct financial dependency of corporate interests,

** Labor practices to become a true professional formation, that do not foster the precariousness of labor, and that dignified wages be paid and organized on an international level,

The economic cost of the necessary access to new technologies not fall upon the students and exclusively benefiting multinational corporations of that sector.

NO TO CAPITLIST CULTURE
EDUCATION IS NOT FOR SALE
ANOTHER EDUCATION IS POSSIBLE