a controversy “which adds to the feeling of being despised”, react teachers and parents of students

When Isabelle, a literature teacher in a Toulouse high school, discovered that her minister was on vacation in Ibiza the day before the start of the Christmas holidays: “I was shocked and at the same time I had a great desire to laugh. I better understood the total disorganization of the start of the school year.”

“Indeed, from Ibiza it was perhaps a little complicated to see the reality on the ground”.

Isabelle, literature teacher

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The image of a Jean-Michel Blanquer who acts with lightness, far from their daily life: this is also what some parents feel. Like this mother of a pupil met in front of a primary school in Bagneux (Hauts-de-Seine): “We don’t live the same life. We, as parents, are in it, our children are in it, they live in an unbearable situation.” The Minister of Education has, she says, “the right to go on vacation, but if he makes decisions since his vacation, which will generate consequences for us in return, then it is a little different.

“It’s not the geographical problem, it shows that they are not in the same spheres and that they are not in the concrete, that they are not there ‘with us’, to go through it all.”

A student mother

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For teachers, this controversy is, explains Isabelle, only a drop of water “which adds to the feeling of being despised for a long time. It’s a term that I don’t use lightly. It only symbolically confirms – to use Jean-Michel Blanquer’s term – what has been happening since this minister has been in power. An opinion shared by Dominique, professor of history and geography in Toulouse: “The operation at the last moment, it has been five years since we saw it with Mr. Blanquer.It’s not new.”

“Of course, he has the right to take a vacation, but we do not send instructions on Sunday evening and it is up to us to manage on Monday morning.”

Dominique, teacher

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Both teachers were on strike last week. Thursday, January 20, when a new call for a strike is launched, they will run for financial reasons first and not to penalize their students. But they reserve for the next day of mobilization, January 27.