A revolt of teachers for the dignity of education

The streets are full of "The dignity of education", written on huge banners. This is what the demonstrations and teachers' strikes are demanding. The resounding no to the agreement reached by the union representatives, with the loud booing of the representative to tell her "We are the ones who are in the classroom" and "It was not a matter of salary", reveals to us the moment we are in. No, it wasn't about working conditions alone, because what teachers want is to be able to exercise their profession properly. They have said it very clearly: well-being is not solely a matter of working conditions; what is being claimed is to exercise the profession with dignity.The teacher unrest is now compounded by a fracture in union representation. Who represents the teachers? Jordi Muñoz's analysis is very accurate regarding the loss of institutional mediations, which in the case of education translates into a crisis of the school itself as an institution: when the classic forms of representation and conflict management falter, the school's capacity to sustain a shared framework of meaning, authority, and professional trust also becomes more fragile. Jordi Muñoz's analysis regarding the loss of institutional mediations, which in the case of education translates into a crisis of the school itself as an institution: when the classic forms of representation and conflict management falter, the school's capacity to sustain a shared framework of meaning, authority, and professional trust also becomes more fragile.

The current situation of schools and teachers, both in Catalonia and the Valencian Community, shows a shared pattern that goes beyond specific conflicts: it is a structural tension in the way education is being governed. Recent mobilizations in both territories – cycles of strikes, rejection of pre-agreements, and sustained protests – express accumulated discontent with the succession of reforms, regulatory changes, and growing demands that impact teachers' daily work. To the complexity experienced in classrooms, we must add permanent curricular changes, new evaluation systems, unequal implementation of inclusion, recurrent debates about methodologies and technologies – yesterday screens yes, today screens no – and a persistent lack of resources to make so many demands viable. All this shapes an unstable scenario, in constant change. Schools continually incorporate new demands without having the necessary conditions to sustain them.

What is there in the face of the avalanche of changes? Well, staffing policies in which temporality makes it impossible to consolidate stable teams and a lack of autonomy in schools makes real leadership by school management very difficult. Faced with so much institutional instability, strikes do not appear as an isolated episode, but as the visible expression of a collective professional discontent that is reproduced in different territories and that reveals the same underlying question: how to sustain a school to which more and more is demanded without giving it the recognition or the resources necessary to exercise its function with stability and shared purpose?Sixteen years ago, in one of those much-missed seminars that the Jaume Bofill Foundation used to organize, we had the opportunity to invite the French sociologist François Dubet and debate with him about his book El declivi de la institució. It was the year 2010, and the debate foreshadowed a fundamental transformation: the school no longer operates as a stable institution that articulates a common project, but as a system subjected to multiple and often contradictory demands. In this scenario, teachers cease to be perceived – and to perceive themselves – as subjects with consolidated professional judgment. They then move on to occupy a position of mere execution in an environment of successive reforms.From this point of view, teacher mobilizations acquire a deep meaning: the current conflict is not a sign of disconnection of the teaching staff with the school system but, paradoxically, a way of reclaiming its meaning. Teacher mobilization can be read as a defense of the dignity of education and the work of teachers. Teachers who do not want to be just another cog in the administration and claim to be the central piece of an institution that can only function if it is recognized, supported, and listened to. Let's avoid seeing it as a reactive response, because what emerges before our eyes is a strong bond between professionals. Revolt is born from a strong bond. We must support the teachers and listen to them now that they are overflowing union dynamics. Where school tends to be experienced as a service subject to the immediate satisfaction of individual demands, protests demand the recovery of the school institution. Enough of being governed by a sum of preferences according to where the wind blows. School is the space where – with teachers as protagonists – a common, educational, and democratic good is built.