Never before has the situation in schools and education been like it is today. Those of us who are teachers and have been in education for over twenty years have a basis for comparison. Chronic autoimmune diseases. Shortages of permanent staff, spending cuts, outdated curricula. Teachers are blamed for all the problems in education, so they go about their work feeling disrespected, gloomy, and with their heads bowed.
For several years now, he has been under attack from all sides. The Ministry, the media, parents, students, alone and unprotected. The phenomena are becoming increasingly widespread. Parents who physically assault teachers, parents with unreasonable and irregular demands exert intense pressure and make unfounded complaints. In order to shirk its responsibilities, the Ministry is acting like Pontius Pilate, not only failing to protect teachers but also encouraging these phenomena with complaint and evaluation platforms.
Firstly, students will never put these «brilliant policies» into practice. It's a farce with interactive whiteboards, vegetable gardens, hundreds of irrelevant and useless programs that exhaust schools, isolate and strip teachers of their ability to impart knowledge. Students, absorbed in smoke and their cell phones, come and leave school without a smile.
We teachers no longer start our day in the classroom with the lesson plan for the day. We start with an assessment of the space. Will order prevail, who will escape, whose gaze is most intense today, whose silence is not innocent? We try to guess what might happen to us. We no longer dare to call it fear. We elegantly call it professionalism. This is how adaptation is christened when it becomes permanent.
Schools, both public and private, are no longer just places of learning. They are places of absorption. They absorb social tensions, family failures, and the absence of the state. And we, as educators, find ourselves at the center of this absorption. Not because we have the power, but because we are available.
Violence against teachers does not always manifest itself as an event. It manifests itself as an atmosphere. As repetition. As daily questioning. As unanswered sarcasm. As a boundary that is pushed back a little further each time.
In public schools, this violence is often brutal. Verbal, physical, threatening. And when it happens, the question is not «what happened,» but «how did you handle it.».
In private schools, violence takes on a different form. It becomes surveillance, insecurity, and subtle threats. Teachers learn that dissent comes at a price.
The common denominator is loneliness. When the limit is exceeded, it is not protection that is activated, but bureaucracy. They wrap you up in a piece of paper, ready with a solution, timeless. In the past, it was the inspector; now, it is Pierrakakis« platform.
Violence becomes political when the Ministry talks about evaluation but remains silent on protection. This is not negligence. It is a choice.
We can no longer talk abstractly about «the Ministry.» The conditions in which we work are the result of specific choices, specific directions, specific governance, and specific policy choices.
The educational policies of the New Democracy party did not address violence against teachers as an institutional problem. They treated it as collateral damage. As something that would be «regulated» through individual responsibility, with more discipline always on the part of the teacher.
The chronic underfunding of public education is not just a matter of budget figures. It means classrooms without support, schools without staff, teachers who are called upon to perform multiple roles without the necessary tools. When schools are constantly operating at their limits, any tension can easily turn into conflict, and that conflict ends up affecting those who are most exposed: the teachers.
The evaluation, as implemented by the governments of the New Democracy party, was not designed as a support tool. Without substantial training, without strengthening school units, without upgrading working conditions, it acts as a punishment. Teachers are called upon to prove their worth in an environment that the state itself has weakened. So that it can point the finger at them.
Training, rather than being an institutional right, is treated as an individual obligation. Teachers are expected to «modernize» in their free time, at their own expense. Professionalism is required, but no support is offered.
Salaries, stagnant, weak, inadequate for the responsibilities and pressure we bear. They turn endurance into a prerequisite for survival.
All these choices are not neutral. They create a climate. They make teachers vulnerable to bullying by students, parents, and administrators. Bullying is not a social phenomenon; it is politically generated and has a purpose: to devalue.
The neoliberal policies of the New Democracy party are sacrificing schools to the markets, feeding them to the insatiable hunger for efficiency. Knowledge is becoming a commodity, classrooms are becoming measurable numbers, and education is teaching students not to question but to obey. The result is not only damaged infrastructure and exhausted teachers, but also the emergence of citizens who grow up in ignorance, individualism, and indifference.
A school that does not cultivate curiosity, thought, or participation produces citizens who are easily manipulated, who follow the crowd without questioning, who accept misinformation as truth, who learn to measure only performance and not substance. Students who grow up obeying the demands of the market and remaining silent in the face of injustice, with shriveled hearts and minds that dare not question.
The school of ignorance does not teach knowledge, it teaches silence, obedience, isolation. It does not cultivate citizens; it cultivates spectators of a society that learns to follow, to endure, to tolerate. Within this silence, manipulation becomes natural, indifference becomes a lesson, and individual survival becomes a rule of life.
In the end, the same question always remains: who can endure? And who decided that they must endure?.
The current educational reality is not a natural phenomenon. It is a carefully considered and cleverly designed policy. It is the school that New Democracy governments have produced for forty years now, poor in resources, rich in demands, strict with teachers, lenient with the causes of the crisis, eager to evaluate, unwilling to support.
When teachers are left alone to face violence, questioning, and disparagement, this is no accident. It is the point where politics meets pedagogy. And there, in this void, bullying of teachers is born, not as a temporary deviation, but as the norm.
We are not asking for heroism. We are asking for political responsibility. And as long as this is not assumed, as long as the government continues to label destruction as «reform,» schools will cease to be places of education and will become testing grounds for endurance. The only certainty is that teachers are on the verge of collapse and the result will be tragic for society.
All this is not neutral. It is a choice. And it has a name.
Let's not hide behind our finger...
