The day after the strike

After opening the computer, I was in a dilemma whether to write a letter first to the Ombudsman or to spell out a text for a newspaper. I'm not sure which of these two choices is more necessary, especially since I've been coming home from work pretty cranky for two months now. I am aware that both records are a path to healing, as I am unable to cry as much as I need to, and enough times I have had unspoken frustration run over my head.

I am genuinely at a loss as to how much it is educational workers during the duration of this strike activated some new disease, how many thyroid glands worked, ulcers burst or panic attacks combined with nervous breakdowns occurred. At the same time, I prevent myself from getting dark because my high school colleagues are still suspended and I cheer for them with the last atoms of my strength, but I feel the responsibility to warn them of the potential development of the scenario that is in store for them too if they withdraw.

When a child concludes about you

Because in elementary schools - the educational strike basically only brought more repression and crazy solutions!

There are people more humane than me, with immense love for humanity and I admire them for that, so in the newly acquired solidarity they find seeds that will germinate in some new age. Somewhere, a strong bond was achieved between colleagues, between teachers and parents, and finally between students and teachers. Because this April, a significant number of students admire certain teachers, while others are disgusted and call them followers of the regime, people without guts and self-confidence, and scumbags among teachers.

And what a child can infer about you is usually true, whether you want to admit it or not. Students will notice when your eyebrows are uneven, if you are wearing yesterday's clothes, and if you are a living being or a clerk who treats living beings as if they were made of cardboard. With that, the difficult battle in this fight was still won. It has been shown who among the teachers is a person of dignity and integrity, and who is an earthworm with eyes on the ass in the realm of opportunism. What wealth felt by the teachers whose former students and parents organized support gatherings in front of the schools, how many hugs they ran into and read their own names on the banners decorated with a big heart! It is sad that some did not allow themselves to experience such a thing and will continue to enter their classrooms without this great memory, their heads bowed never to be lifted.

Derrida and V. Lalić taught me to love mistakes, cracks that carry with them a special beauty, imperfections of the silent, secretive and heartbreaking. However, there is nothing beautiful about the cracks in the education system, because they have flooded the sky.

Directors who take revenge

The educational strike is threatened by the unlawful deduction of wages and the danger of exceeding the conditionality of school calendars. Numerous donations appeared, which are currently interpreted as corruption in the world of school administrations. Thus, a system flooded with corruption, in which no project has passed without its participation, creates spin from the act of solidarity of the entire nation with the profession that accepted the risk in order to support students.

Education stepped forward in every general strike, and with the act of suspension entered illegal waters, knowingly agreeing to the gray zone, because its everyday life within the legal framework is too black, for a good number of decades.

Teachers in a large number of elementary schools, in addition to the fact that they did not receive a salary, are facing a new wave of repression just after leaving the suspension of classes. There are directors who are sanctimonious, so they have started to review the contracts of colleagues who are employed "on a fixed term". As the uninitiated would know - these are young colleagues, fresh educators, whose rebellious spirit should be the guiding star in the new world that young people are fighting for. Their contracts are being canceled in order to replace them with flies from the pioneer park, who with their quasi-doctorates stand guard in front of the presidency, showing that loyalty is the basic principle professionalism in the modern education system of the Republic of Serbia. They have no other protection than the love that students feel for them.

Fees were imposed on primary schools, for which there is no prescribed rule. It is left to the mercy of the managers to decide how to deal with their unruly workers. A certain number of colleagues galloped to catch up as soon as possible, as if they had not been on strike until yesterday. It is precisely in this nerdy nature of every teacher that the hidden point of discord that stifled the scope of civil disobedience that the educators at one point accepted, motivated by the youthful enthusiasm that inspires and liberates the citizens of this country in the best possible way.

Wallet perspective

But educators are not young, often not creative, and even less durable. They are used to having their rebellions suppressed, their demands ignored, and their working conditions reduced to an existential minimum. On the other hand, they always think about their students, especially when they shouldn't. They do not know how to make up for the contents of the missed lessons, they have a responsibility stronger than the tectonic disturbances that the rebellion brings with it.

Even though their own families are torn apart, because they come home distraught over the circumstances in which they strike, they don't want to create disintegration in other people's houses and accept to bow their heads again, believing that someone managed to hear them and that they didn't make the whole mess for no reason at all.

Although teachers have been divided in the public and political discourse for decades into obedient, suffering and enthusiastic, and there is much more emphasis on division than on improvement, in fact today they are all in the same position.

Someone will jump up and say - how in the same? Well, some have been paid, some have been partially paid, some have not been paid at all. From a wallet perspective, a teacher doesn't have a dinar even when he gets his full salary, so we solved that. That is why we will carry out the equalization where the germ of the whole papacy is. This cataclysm did not happen because educators have a salary below the national average, but because their profession is completely meaningless, and their position is above all disenfranchised.

There is no constructive dialogue in education, but communication is reduced to an unforced inner monologue. She does not follow the spirit of the times. It is not related to new achievements in pedagogy. She did not question her purpose in the harsh capitalist system.

Educators are supposed to educate, and in a frightening way they do not know what education actually has to be today. Some say that it is necessary to educate, but they are not sure how it is right to educate young beings in times when even parents do not know how to do it anymore.

Tech-equipped classrooms create a socially crippled consciousness and an absence of conscience. Students finish elementary school, and some of them have never talked to some of their classmates. In schools, the eighth graders beat the champions. Graduates draw chairs for professors. Every existing teacher is able to write a memoir from his own practice, and every correct student a traumatology of his own upbringing.

Deep wound of the system

In all of this, teachers chase the quotas of imposed plans and programs, recite information whose accuracy they have not reviewed since the time of their studies, push control points into freakishly constructed tables, examine the infinite possibilities of a forty-hour work week and write, write - in order not to use paper to camouflage all the plagues that are suddenly snatching away from life.

At the head of schools, there are often party henchmen who demand respect, instead of earning it. There are also school boards, which usually include friends from local self-governments. School administrations are populated by ex-principals who have been promoted as henchmen.

At the top of their Ministry sits a retired psychiatrist whose shoelaces cost more than a package of their private lessons, to whom one problematic student from each school should be sent for therapy to describe the nature of reality in which he is pricelessly lost. Some parents would give the teachers social assistance because they didn't get paid, others would beat them. It is known who drinks everything, but also who will not pay.

After the murder in Ribnikar, workshops on cooperation, empathy, and tolerance were designed. Thematic weeks were inserted in which the teachers did not know how to manage, because with them no one even processed the collective trauma that is no longer talked about as if it happened four centuries ago. That hasn't stopped the evil spirits from selling non-existent support seminars, because where the honest world cries, the scoundrel profits.

A deep wound was left in the system, never to heal, but to develop gangrene from it and once again fill all the holes from which responsibility, compassion and shame should spring.

In the space of that wound, you too, my dear reader, need to emerge. Now it's up to you to help your former teacher or your own child's teacher. Now is your time to stop, because while you continue on your way, those who pointed out the scourges of the current school system are slapped again and again. They are prohibited from legally striking, with the explanation that one cannot strike forever, while there is never enough money in the budget to fulfill their demands.

Requirements are often minimal and include the right to insurance, a systematic review or travel expenses. In addition to the minimum requirements, there are also those that should not be on the list of requirements because they should imply a natural state. Teachers are looking for a safe environment in schools, the election of directors from the ranks of the collective, not party corridors, adequate working conditions in the classrooms where they stay together with the children.

They are looking for normal conditions for the survival of a profession, because they have completely failed in this. Tired of everything, they make mistakes and don't know how to get up, and they got up even after being beaten.