Strikes ensue. These are claims from those who consider their profession disrespected: teachers. We are talking about a career that has been marked by immense obstacles, year after year, until the rope stretched… and it broke.
But it has been coming to blows for a long time. Let’s face it, the situation that is experienced daily in our schools is not, by far or even close, the most perfect. In fact, we are talking about an institution that, as it were, stopped in time, becoming obsolete in many ways and in urgent need of reform.
Teachers are unmotivated with the various aspects that are well known in the public square and all these aspects deserve our support. But even if these problems were solved, how many others would remain unresolved? Let us think, for example, of the extension of programs. How can a teacher delve into content, work on it in order to foster the critical sense of his students, when he feels the pressure of teaching so much material in such a short space of time? Does whoever designs these programs for each subject have a true idea of what it is like to be in a classroom, of how the teaching-learning relationship works?
Critical spirit needed! We are creating individuals who “debit material” in tests, with the sole purpose of achieving a sufficient average to have access to a given higher education course or to belong to a meaningless honor roll, when we should be forming thinking people, who debate themes and learn through the exchange of ideas. The important thing, I believe, is learning, thinking, analyzing reality, putting the present in perspective from the past and thinking about the world we want for the future. Memorizing is not enough. In fact, it is extremely reductive. Students like to learn, beware of those who accuse them of the opposite. But they need to have appealing, motivating classes, and they need to feel that they have a valid voice.
For all these reasons, the classes have to be rethought, as well as the contents. We have a lot to learn from young people and young people have a lot to learn from us. And it is from the precious interaction between teacher-student and student-student that knowledge is born, in its purest and most consolidated form. Of course, in this relationship, respect becomes fundamental. But this too is created in interaction. All it takes is for the right tools to be used and for teachers to feel the support of parents and the management of their schools or groupings.
Teachers love their profession, but they are in corsets. Therefore, let more freedom be given to teachers and we will all profit from it.
The author writes according to the new spelling agreement