Rediscover the enthusiasm for the new course

This summer that is now ending has undoubtedly been one of the strangest I remember as a teacher. It is a summer that has come after a very turbulent school year, with mobilizations that have certainly been historic, but which have left us exhausted.

Our demands were (are) entirely justified to achieve public and quality education: inclusive schooling and the embrace of diversity, the reduction of group sizes to humanize teaching work, the improvement of the insultingly unfair conditions of the 0-3 age group, abandoning the precariousness of support and leisure teams, the reduction of bureaucratization… The strategy of engaging in a standoff with the administration with a very intense calendar of strike days and the decision of many schools (around 1,300) to adhere to the measure of stopping voluntary field trips and outings beyond working hours, have generated a media and social noise that still resonates today.

July, for teacher teams, is a month for course evaluation and training. I know that this is not talked about much in the media, surely because it is much more appealing to speak ill of the school, but there are many of us who look forward to the first days of July to be able to meet and train at the summer schools organized by teacher movements. This is a good thermometer to make assessments about the emotional state of our collective. There have been moments when the mobilizations have generated a great participatory ferment in these initiatives, as a place to imagine and find new ideas to renew the school. That has not been the case this year. The summer schools have had very low participation. That is why I say we have finished exhausted, fatigued, and hurt.

Hurt by the administration, because for some time now we have not felt heard when we warn of the difficulties we have to face in education in a changing society and with a budget that is not up to the new challenges. Hurt also by the unions because the strategic unity has been broken and this fragmentation has also spread to the teams. Hurt, even if it is hard for us to admit, with ourselves because with these pressure measures that we have ended up taking we have neither improved the quality of the school nor have we obtained the social support we expected. We have stretched the rope a lot, but since we have asked for everything, our frustration and disappointment does not fade in the face of the proposals that arrive and which we see more as provisional patches than as opportunities to rigorously rethink the underlying issues.

How can we, the teams of teachers, rediscover the necessary enthusiasm to resume the course? I am sorry that I cannot give an answer to this question, but I would like to end this reflection by making four requests.

I ask the administration to take the blindfold off its eyes and realize once and for all that the school must change at the same pace as society, and that more diversity must be equivalent to having more tools to deal with it. I would ask the unions for unity of action to stop disorienting and fragmenting us. I would ask the teaching teams to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, because alongside the demands we have previously exposed there are other demands that can represent a brake on building a more globalized, more democratic and more active school. I would ask the families not to forget that we are not mobilizing to maintain privileges, but that we are leading a struggle that must be joint to create a public, Catalan and quality school for children. And to the children and young people, apart from asking them for patience in front of the adults who are by their side, I ask them for nothing, because they never fail and surely it will be with them that we will be able to rebuild the enthusiasm we need today.