“Everything is ready!” says Minister Yelitze Santaella when announcing October 3 as the date to return to school. She accompanies her announcement with three pieces of information: the Military Community Education Brigades recovered and enabled the facilities; Teachers kicked off September 15 planning for the school year; by September 23, 91% of the children were already enrolled. Parents and teachers, however, do not share his optimism. Neither do the stats. The data of reality and what they clearly generate are greater: doubt, suspicion and uncertainty.
Parents wonder and worry about the cost of school supplies, the visible deterioration of facilities, transportation, school meals, the precariousness of basic services such as Internet, the dedication capacity of poorly paid teachers and little recognition. The constant protests by the teachers’ union, both in basic and university education, reveal a clearly contradictory condition with official declarations and with the value of education itself. There is, possibly, the key: neither the State nor society seem to give education the value that corresponds to it.
The beginning of the school year is the moment to ask oneself about the demands for a quality education, in tune with the needs and changes, with a positive and realistic vision of the country, with the shared conviction about the value of human development as the indispensable base for the construction of a better society. The issue could not be more pressing, both because of the immediacy of an urgency that does not accept postponements and because of what it substantially means: attention to the factor that makes the difference between backwardness and growth, mediocrity and excellence, subjection and freedom, dependency and autonomy. .
To think of education in this way is to pose problems such as the training of teachers and their social recognition, the updating of study programs, their articulation with reality, attention to the immediate needs of students, parents and teachers, who are urgently consideration of the state and society. Seen in this way, the beginning of the year cannot simply be the reiteration of a routine or the acceptance of the calendar. It supposes assuming it as the renewal of a social commitment with something fundamental and permanent and, at the same time, as the beginning of a new cycle, more promising, strengthened with experience, open to innovations. It involves asking about the ends and the means: what is being pursued, how it should be, what should be corrected, what should it have, what conditions should it meet, who should be the actors and what should be their obligations.
Questions like this could lead to conclusions about the priority attention of the State and society, the adjustment of budgets to cover needs, the participation of parents, institutions and society, the acceptance of special humanitarian assistance programs, whose offer seems to collide with an incomprehensible official position that rejects them at the same time that it does not stop proclaiming its intention or its promise to serve the people as a priority. The explanation for this paradox should perhaps be found in a lack of political reason that it refuses to accept because it refuses to see or in an inability to address the issue with realism, humility and generosity.
It is not possible to speak of education without the intention of improving, without complying with the basic requirements of the 180 real days of schooling, without adequate premises, without permanent improvement of teachers, without community participation. Optimism is not right when it collides with alarming data on school dropouts, low enrollment in universities, abandonment of the teaching profession, improvisation, acceptance of mediocrity.
October 3 marks the students’ return to class. Hopefully it would also serve to return to the issue of education, an issue that daily emergencies seem to have relegated to the background.
