When I got back from the weekend I talked with a friend, an ESO teacher. She talks to me a lot and very badly about the mood of the cloister of her institute. In all her years in practice, she has never seen so many colleagues longing for retirement. “This Friday, in the teachers’ room – she explains to me – there were five of them counting the years, the months and the days to leave. And me, if I were fifteen years younger, I would leave it and go to another country.
She is so confident that things will change as your servant that the parties will agree, one day, to pass a law that places education at the center of children’s learning and teacher training. One’s blood boils over the arrogant impunity, the absence of self-criticism, and the contumacy of the errors of those who are behind the wheel of the educational system and who run over us all.
Primary school, continues my friend, has become an esplai, and secondary school will soon do so. The complexity of the matter is frightening and, worse, it is not even new. They come up in the conversation from the conflict of the generations of adolescents to the demotivation of a teaching staff that has to act as a teacher, a police officer, an investigator, a lawyer, Bruce Lee and Superman all at the same time and without being noticed in your performance.
Then there is the well-known, doubly worrying. One, concentration and attention difficulties in children who live tied to a screen and with no other language than chat. Two, the lack of authority in the classroom, the cantamañanas pedagogy and egalitarianism in mediocrity. So no wonder the professors want to run away to Ganymede.
The metaphor of the tree that grows crooked. You just have to look at so many kids that, in their 2nd year of high school, it’s not that they don’t know anything about history, it’s that they don’t even know how to write without mistakes.
And how dangerous is ignorance.