and are shamefully underpaid. It would be enough to compare their salaries with those of any officer from the Armed Forces or the Ministry of Interior. But this is hardly one of the many nonsenses that led to the mass exodus from the education system, especially the most competent and experienced teachers. A mere opinion survey among them( I did one in due time) would be enough to know, for example, that the main cause for leaving the classrooms was not the salary, but the fact that their professionalism and moral principles did not allow them to adhere to certain rules and impositions within the system. Among the causes of their discontent stands out the way in which, arbitrarily and without room for dispute, they were forced for years to give a passing grade to the immense majority of the students, even those who were not devoted to study and showed very poor performances and absolute lack of knowledge. The teachers had to guarantee the highest pass rates at any cost. The cold number was imposed and is still imposed to the good offices of the educator. I have personally listened to many of those professionals describing a scandalous, rigid, mediocre, and incontestable spiral, according to which the principal gave them such orders in response to the demand of the education department at the municipality, which in turn responded to the leadership in the province, which followed the instructions issued by the Ministry of Education, which obeys the guidelines given by the government, because it’ s politically needed to inflate the statistics to mislead the world public opinion. These old teachers massively left the classrooms and renounced to their lifelong vocation, but they also declared that they were sick and tired with the unreasonable ideologization that prevailed in each standard, in each assessment, in each project of the national education system. They were also sick and tired with the antipedagogical, dogmatic, manipulative, chauvinistic and brutalizing program designs and the regulations for teaching the curriculum. They asserted that the point is not the shortcomings, as the official discourse has stated sometimes, but the conscientiously decreed basic abnormalities that they had to put in force against their specialized criteria and ethical principles. They even found themselves in the delicate position of standing up for such abnormalities, as visible talking heads of a system whose rules they did not share, because they had no right to fix anything since they were never even consulted with due respect. It is equally well known that, before the systematic exodus of the old teachers, the government was obliged to replace them with others poorly trained, sometimes very young, almost children. It also tried in vain to recover them, but without eliminating or amending the main causes of their discontent. It merely offered them lukewarm salary improvements. As usual. The government systematically destroy cities for decades, and then it pretends to disguise their ruins in the most slipshod manner with improvisations in a hurry. It erodes the soil, spending many years in thorough work for turning it into wasteland, and its officials wake up one morning and accuse the peasants of being unproductive. Likewise, the government dismantle, with conquerors’ indolence, the best traditions along with all the cultural structures, and then they hurry up to build good qualities. Per the official media, that is a priority of the education system nowadays: to build good qualities in the children, as an imperative imposed by the loss of values hanging over the Cubans like a plague. The truth is that if the government would understand as
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