Choosing to work in the field of education and staying there against all odds is not an easy task. Many break their teeth there and drop out after a few years. Some people talk about a vocation or stubbornness, it depends. The teachers and professionals I have worked with for more than 25 years carry within them, for the vast majority, strong humanist aspirations which they still thrive on, despite a social context which is less and less favorable to them.
Faced with persistent criticism and the lack of recognition of their profession, they choose to brave the storms and maintain their demands for probity, rigor, openness, and to value knowledge. Neither the prevailing consumerist trend, nor the erosion of the public school system, nor the growing place of the private sector in education, nor utilitarian educational orientations, nor parental or student clientelism can shake the pillars of their commitment.
These junkie educators are addicted to the educational relationship and the integral development of their students. Every interaction is the foundation of a more engaged society, every individual progress is a victory over darkness, every step towards the deployment of free thought is the foundation of a more lucid world. Aware of the importance of this emancipatory matrix that is the school, they lay one by one the stones of a cathedral still to be built, the outcome of which they will not always see. Cynicism for them will never be an option, because they understand that if they are not part of the solution, it is because they are contributing to the problem.
If the deployment of a greater planetary consciousness and the development of less individualistic, more empathetic, engaged and happy citizens constitute the great goals of every education enthusiast, it is the daily interactions and small, innocuous progress that nourish their commitment to day by day: a student who discovers a new interest in a given field, a student who gains confidence, another who updates certain dormant talents, a group who completes an ambitious collective project, a student who unlocks in mathematics, a student who gets involved in his community out of a desire to make a difference. And all the others who develop their intellectual, cognitive, metacognitive skills and sharpen their curiosity and critical thinking through contact with new knowledge, all those whose achievements nourish their conscience and their well-being.
School can be a wonderful breeding ground for self-actualization for many students if its components, that is to say its passionate professionals and its human structure, strive not to accentuate the socio-economic gaps that our system has. two speeds is being endorsed. Because we must not deceive ourselves: as advantaged students desert the public sector in favor of private programs or private schools, a significant segment of the population is offered an impoverished path, an impoverishment which results in groups of more more heterogeneous in higher education.
How can we believe in the importance of our work when the burden of proof, including indicators, always rests on the teacher and on the institution which must do everything to satisfy its users, increase success rates and recruit as many students as possible? ” clients ” ?
A disease is gradually corrupting our institutions: economic pragmatism and the industrialization of education which are eating away the last ramparts of scientific humanism at the heart of the Parent reform. The college network has managed to resist as much as possible the utilitarian trend with which our university network has struggled since it agreed to leave a large place to private funding in research. The mission of our school system is undergoing changes, the consequences of which we do not yet understand.
In this context of harmful austerity, the profession of teacher-educator within our schools must more than ever be recognized for its true value. Real work on social recognition of this centuries-old profession remains to be done. The structure and mandatory quantified accountability of our institutions elude and distort the work of specialist craftsmen whose concerns are often relegated to the background.
Why not focus more on issues that reflect endemic unhappiness: dropping out and teacher burnout, public outings of disillusioned management lacking material and professional resources, poverty and socio-economic gaps, lack of commitment of numerous students and the increasing failures in general education courses, the significant gaps of the new cohorts in terms of cognitive and language skills?
Thank you, teachers, professionals, awakeners of conscience, proud slayers of ignorance, inhabited by this impulse of life: you are on a daily basis artisans concerned with exposing our young people to knowledge, to culture, to art, to the beauty and mysteries of life. Let us continue to be fully engaged and listen to the wise man Gandhi: “Be the change you want in the world. » May time have no influence on this dream of emancipation of new generations which has led you, like me, to work in the field of education.
“There is a crack in everything / This is how the light enters.” » – Leonard Cohen