Master failure

For decades, the prestige and recognition of teachers in our society have been in steady decline. A high school teacher is no longer more than a poor wretch in the eyes of too many people, it seems, who are despised by both the intelligent students, who finally realize the farce, and the lazy or dull ones, who oppose everything that involves rolling up one's sleeves. From politics, the profession has not been provided with tools and values, with the excuse of the budget or that high schools were just transit zones between university, where the capable would finish their education, and vocational training, where the others would learn a trade to avoid starving. There have also been, certainly, accommodating spirits, who have lived up to the cliché of the lazy and evasive civil servant, who only seeks to do the minimum – distribute photocopies – and run away for the weekend. But the majority are people passionately dedicated to knowledge and the transmission of knowledge, who enjoy explaining themselves and making knowledge what it truly is: an adventure. The rest of society, however, has been left with the image of the useless and condescending professor, who has two months of vacation, double pay, and who takes sick leave when they can, doesn't explain much to the kids, and deep down wouldn't want to be there. But what has worsened the profession has not been the teachers but the students; if they came with a real desire to work, learn and improve, the teachers would be the first to be amazed; if the students had a real desire to work and study, things could become unbearable for the entire system. What has declined and made everything even more complicated has been the failure of basic home education, which sends to institutions – the law requires it – children who have no desire to do anything other than look at a screen or lie around. If young people do not believe in the future, in knowledge, in the progressive improvement of themselves and society, in the fact that by knowing things they can have a good future and a good life, any educational reform, even of the conditions of teachers, is useless. But the world they think they know speaks to them of millionaire footballers and YouTubers, of irredeemable people who get rich with nonsense and without knowing anything. They are not surrounded by a reality where knowledge seems to have any importance or prestige, and herein lies the problem. Often, the same teacher they have in front of them is nothing more than a warning, not an example: as if the best that could happen to them from getting good grades was to become a secondary school teacher, with all that it implies in terms of frustrations and more or less economic miseries (now accentuated by strikes). Society, the world, does not give them the necessary information for them to end up understanding all the options and realities that exist in a vast and complex world like the one outside the classrooms. A world that despises teachers, that laughs at them, just like the national police officer who went viral for arbitrarily beating a sixty-eight-year-old Valencian teacher.