Relentless dismantling of the public education service in Greece

Tuesday 2 December 2025, by Andreas Sartzekis


In his obsession with privatizing education, Prime Minister Mitsotakis is intensifying and diversifying attacks to dramatically reduce public services. The mobilization commemorating the massacre of the Polytechnic students on November 17, 1973, is a significant event.


Against a backdrop of insufficient budget, there is a lack of teachers everywhere, and many premises are not renovated and are dangerous: last week, a ceiling fell on students in Euboea.

Attacks of all kinds

For some time now, right-wing propaganda has been trying to hide the real responsibilities by launching a veritable national smear campaign against teachers, portraying them as lazy and uninterested in students!

This odious campaign is explained, among other things, by the fact that the profession has for several years refused a so-called evaluation procedure, which aims to exclude teachers who refuse to turn themselves into little soldiers executing orders.

Linked to this "deprofessionalization" project is the new high school programme: national exams every year, with rote learning and additional evening classes in small, expensive private tutoring centres…

Blatant repression

The repression has recently taken on a dimension reminiscent, for some, of the country’s darkest periods. Repression against teachers’ unions (around 2,500 administrative prosecutions!) and against student unions.

University surveillance, with certain presidents at the forefront, like that of the Polytechnic University of Athens: cameras, ban on displays (a student has just been sentenced to 14 months in prison for a pro-Palestinian slogan on a wall of the university).

And intense police violence against demonstrations by school-aged youth, such as recently where parents and their young children were tear-gassed in front of the Athens rectorate, where they were protesting against the common practice of merging classes.

At the Polytechnic again, the president called the police to evacuate a student general assembly in support of the mobilization against the 13-hour workday law! Result: fifteen students were arrested, and the cessation of all prosecutions is one of the main current demands.

And, as a symbol of this Trump-like policy, a plan to exclude "eternal students" is being prepared. "Eternals," meaning first and foremost students who also have a full-time job and often need additional years to complete their studies: 285,000 students could be victims of this unprecedented measure of social selection, which the student movement obviously rejects.

Mobilization against the dismantling of public services

Against this relentless dismantling of public services and against social selection, the battle is being organized: following the successful mobilization of the National Education system on November 6 in some forty cities, the commemoration of the massacre of the Polytechnic students on November 17, 1973, is an important step. Already, at the Polytechnic, there is a mass of people of of all ages amidst the union and political stands, in a resounding response to Mitsotakis and his henchmen!

November 20, 2025.

Translated by International Viewpoint from l’Anticapitaliste.


Attached documentsrelentless-dismantling-of-the-public-education-service-in_a9283.pdf (PDF - 905.4 KiB)
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Andreas Sartzekis is active in the Fourth International Programmatic Tendency, one of the two groups of the Greek section of the Fourth International.

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