Last year, 1,947 teachers from across the state asked for help from the Teachers' Ombudsman of the ANPE union, a figure created in 2015. Since then, their actions have reached 44,386. The threats, insults and lack of respect towards the figure of the teacher, they say, go further, such as the lack of discipline and effort in learning.
We spoke with the secretary of the majority secondary education union in Catalonia, the Professors de Secundària union (ASPEPC-SPS). Xavier Massó has a degree in philosophy and educational sciences and also in social and cultural anthropology. He is a professor of Philosophy, author of The End of Education (Akal) and co-author of Canceled Education (Sloper). He also chairs the Episteme Foundation, which promotes research and debate on the educational system.
Are threats from parents to teachers getting worse these days? Do you receive many?
Yes, more and more. The atmosphere is progressively becoming more rarefied. The original reason is that there is no regulation on threats or attacks on teachers, or it is diffuse, very guaranteeing. Among the students themselves there is an anomie or lack of regulations. The new LOMLOE model doesn't help either.
Threats or attacks on teachers, the regulations do include them...
Yes, but it is a very lax regulation. It has protocols, mediation, processes that mean putting the teacher at the same level as the student, and they are not at the same level, one teaches and the other learns. There are many situations of indiscipline of various nature, acts of rudeness that are daily. There are also attacks, which are analogous to those that occur in harassment between students.
What do you recommend, as a union, to teachers who suffer from it?
Go directly to the courts. Sometimes, if you go to the police, they question you why you don't fix it at school, with mediation... These are nonsense that slows down, and in the end nothing happens, there are no consequences.
Is it common for fathers and mothers to come to school to protest?
Yes. Students with a 1 on a test, whose father comes to protest because the teacher does not explain well. If the student has not gone to class, it is difficult for him to evaluate how the teacher explains. These bizarre situations occur very often.
What do you attribute it to?
To a progressive relaxation of teaching, especially in primary school. They are in a model that causes them to arrive very poorly prepared. We find students in the first and second years of ESO who do not know how to read beyond one line. The percentage begins to be significant. How can someone who even has difficulties multiplying have reached ESO? There is a progressive relaxation, which makes students bored. I don't justify the disruptive student, but imagine that you don't know how to add and in the first year of ESO they explain square roots to you. You can't understand it, you get bored, and you are a potential disruptor.
What else influences?
Attacks, insults and burst tires on teachers' cars are the order of the day and are often hidden. We have had teachers attacked who have kept quiet about it, because there are managements that act within the margin they have, but others look the other way. The centers where attacks and threats are usually known are those where they happen less, because it is an anomaly; In the others it is normalized, not even reports are made. The big problem is a situation of anomy, whoever should lead does not lead. There is a tangle of absurdities that generate a progressively degraded situation.
On the agenda, what does it mean? What dimension does this have?
We do not have a reliable measure because many attacks are hidden. Serious cases appear in the news, of students with knives and teachers in the emergency room, but we receive complicated cases every day. It does not occur in all institutes, but the problem is that it proliferates and multiplies. There are directorates that understand what happens and sanction, but it is a growing problem, especially after the application of inclusive education, the suppression of special education centers, and their integration into normal classrooms, with the rest of the students, of the students who were in the centers.
In what way has it affected you?
This fundamentally has two aspects. One is students who need special attention due to mental disabilities. They need a special education, not integrated into a classroom in institutes where sometimes nothing is controlled. But the problem is the behavioral students, who are also in special education centers: if you put these, who are disruptors, harassers by definition, in a normal classroom in a situation of absolute anomie, they become the owners.
Are there social factors that also explain the increase in conflict situations?
Students have practically no references and in high school or school (where all this begins), they are not introduced to study routines, to the culture of effort. Learning mathematics or syntactic analysis is not easy, and we are using strategies that do not work. "Let them know how to put accents, but they don't learn the reason"... well, if you don't learn the regulations... If you have to know a square root, but they haven't explained the principle to you, it can't be. There is an educational model that is failing, the system fails and there are no effective regulations in the centers.
Does the same happen in public, charter and private institutes?
No. In the subsidized system it happens, but they hide it more, with the difference that in the subsidized system they take away from the student who does this, and bill it to the public. In the public the frequency is higher.
How do new teachers arrive at secondary schools? Many did not have an initial vocation, and when they arrive at the classroom they find all this...
According to the center, when they arrive they are perplexed. This does not happen in any other job, in some jobs you will be more exploited, you will have a poorly organized schedule... but having to pay the bills? Receiving insults in the workplace can be reported. How do they arrive prepared? Academically, we must assume that they arrive well, they have degrees, but since Education the specialty is loaded, and an English teacher is assigned to teach music...
Are educational laws the basis of all problems?
The laws are deteriorating the educational system, which has given up teaching. Educational systems were established for the transmission of knowledge that cannot be learned at home. If they give up transmitting knowledge and evaluating, because qualitative evaluations must be carried out and you must evaluate a thousand explanations of why you give the grade... Nowadays, resumes are adapted to students, and therefore the content they must receive is reduced. The result is that they do not come out ready.
You relate it to dropping out of school...
Early school leaving is the sum of those who do not have an ESO degree with those who have passed it (because it was given to them) but soon abandon further non-compulsory studies. Why do they leave? Because they have not learned anything, and an electrician training cycle cannot cope with it because they do not have the basis. We have one of the highest early school leaving rates in Europe, officially it is 18 or 20%, factually higher. It is the result of what is done in the educational system: if I give ESO to a student who has failed 70%, I am not doing them any favors. The idea that the educational system is there to teach has been lost. Now the important thing is the student's happiness, the student's emotional display.
Does the current system, in your opinion, take away responsibilities from young people?
This educational model is designed as if everyone were perfect, and this is not the case, there must be rules and sanctions if they are not met, expulsions and responsibility for parents. I'm not talking about punishments, but there are students who probably should not be in school with the rest. There is an absolute lack of responsibility, here everyone does what they want.
What do you think of the mobilization of families to delay adolescents' access to their first mobile phone?
Well, with some nuances. I agree with psychiatrist Manfred Spitzer, author of Digital Dementia. He is against the use of mobile phones in children under 16 years of age, he is against the abuse of screens. What families say seems very good to me, but behind it there is sometimes a consideration of the devices as demonic, and the problem is their use. It is society that induces abuse, enjoins students to have these devices. Society works like this. Francisco Villar and Spitzer have shown that the use of technologies from a very early age creates a dependency that conditions the vision of life.
What do you think that Educació asks each center to regulate mobile phones, and there is no common regulation?
The Department usually acts like this. Don't they want to ban? Well, perhaps cell phones should be banned in all educational centers in Catalonia. I don't see a problem with the ban in the centers.
Should the reaction and regulations be global, school and family?
Yes, it should be a global regulation. Families must agree, and it is the only way. The school must establish another way of doing things, “here you come to do something else, and you don't need to bring a cell phone”, if one day you need it to study something specific, they will take it. If the entire society is not made aware of the effects of cell phone dependency, banning schools from school will not do much good. It is also necessary to regulate mobile advertising, it is a whole, a global solution is necessary.
