The loneliness of the teacher

It is not surprising that the educational discussion is limited to February and March. Nor should it be superficial and tinged with prejudice. You could say that for leadership in general, it is a “seasonal” issue. And as such, after its moment, it is lost in the endless tangle of unresolved dilemmas.

There is always talk about everything bad that exists in education: the low results in international tests; of teacher absenteeism; of the damage that unionism does to the sector; of the weak training of those who practice teaching; of the “dangerous” ideology of its contents and the supposed indoctrination that occurs in the classrooms. In general, all of this occurs without statistics, without specific knowledge and without adequate readings to support these points of view.

It goes without saying that the educational system is complex, with asymmetries, divided into different levels and modalities and that thousands of teachers and students pass through it. Therefore, the criteria of efficiency and effectiveness to address it must be crossed by those of equity. The current fashion of reducing everything to a mathematical calculation is not only old, but insufficient to provide precise answers to a system full of singularities.

The cruelty of educational detachment is that we never talk about those who practice the profession, their shortcomings, their efforts in a country that gives no respite. Nor about their dreams, the heart and the skills they display to their students, in often terrible working conditions. From their hurried transfers from one school to the other; of their endless hours; of weekends or nights correcting, planning, thinking about the day and weeks that follow in their classrooms.

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The schools reflect the country’s economic and social failure: every day they receive more boys and girls who have breakfast or lunch in their dining rooms, sometimes improvised. They arrive hungry. Teachers await them who receive them with affection and are prepared to educate them, despite the context, with the hope of changing it. Nobody speaks with admiration about it. How they fight desertion by searching one by one for those who leave the classrooms; of the school guidance teams and managers who address increasingly deeper conflicts, which many times exceed their training and professional responsibility.

We quickly forget that part of who we are we owe to their efforts. The respect we had for them vanished with the superficiality of our concerns and in the individualism we embraced out of inertia, too busy with ourselves.

Are alone. Too aware that their reality is static, accustomed to receiving criticism and being forgotten. But they go to their schools every day and when they cross the threshold of the classroom they transform their pessimism into hope for their students.

What happens is not capricious. Education has not been central for decades. Any growth and development program assumes a certain educational model and its corresponding financing formula for the sector. It is impossible to think of sustainable evolution without it.

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The educational debate should be trending topics and fill with influencers serious and trained. But it doesn’t seem sellable. Incredible, given that the consequences of a good or bad education reach inexorably every sector of a country’s economy and culture.

The leadership’s distraction and its inability to address what is central, its passion for sensationalism, hide a staggering conceptual lack of the educational dilemmas that the country has and that ignores its central actors. Meanwhile, teachers face their task alone.

* Educator, journalist