In more settled parts of the world, World Teacher’s Day (not Education Day) is celebrated with meetings between parents, teachers and students in places where frowning masks can be removed at least for a while.

Every now and then you see a hateful teacher refer to his students as scumbags, ungrateful, ungrateful, disinterested in school, disdainful of learning, seeking success, perfectly suited to the little world they have created for themselves.

I don’t like anything anymore. A teacher broken by hatred and frustration must be a contradiction in terms.

And yet I cannot say that I do not understand where all this evil sediment in human souls comes from.

Learning takes place most often in classes, but its success is prepared for a long time.

And the primary condition and sine qua non because success is attention, which Simone Weil once said was a form of caring.

Unfortunately, there is no harder time to pay attention than in this world oversaturated with irrelevant stimuli and noise.

Attention is not a reflexive act, it is a profoundly selective act with significant moral consequence, a radical personal decision, a determination to be present at one moment and not another, to acknowledge certain experiences and information and not others. When it is not necessarily fixed on a specific object, ideally it can take the form of a general attitude, a principled openness to the world and the souls that inhabit it. In fact, without this provision, the fixation of attention will remain irredeemably random, contextual, superficial and unstable.

Thus, speaking of the attention that the teacher gives, the attention that captures you in the middle of a learning situation, an experiment transformer, substantial and benevolent attention, I will say that this is due to several things.

First of all, the physical and mental state of the person who is going to study, the general state of health, the level of fatigue, etc. This is an elementary condition, but it is difficult to obtain in a world where there is a lot of poverty and even where there is abundance, with great menu you get a liter of juice.

Secondly, the family a priori, the general situation in the family, the relationship between parents, as well as the previous interpretation through which the student looks at the learning process, how the school and teachers are perceived in the primary group, the importance given to the school, where the child learns, in the first years of his education, the basic patterns, inclinations and values. The family no longer supports the school, the families no longer respect the school, the teachers shout. Of course, sometimes this is true, more often than we would like to see. But I ask myself, a parent and a full-time teacher, when I do this, do families always feel the same interest and respect?

The importance that society as a whole places on education also seems fundamental to me. Is school in Romania a respectable institution today? Does it deliver what it claims? Could this represent a social elevator? Does it remain indispensable for a child who wants to succeed in life? And above all, I ask again, are we teachers entirely innocent of this general decline? Did our chronic silence and submission play no part in shaping the current situation?

We accuse children of insufficient curiosity, depth, lack of love for books. But are we always the kind of people we ask them to be? How many of us today are truly intellectually open, inquisitive, ready to learn?

We reproach them for their lack of respect, but admit that many of us still dream of being little dictators with all the implicit advantages (unconditional obedience, no objections, etc.).

And yet, perhaps, there is no deeper humiliation and pain for a good teacher than the indifference, inattention and contempt of those whom he came to teach. Precisely because the pedagogical act remains fundamentally free, the act of respect, care and, bordering on affection, rejection has all the tragedy and maelstrom of decisive existential refusal. This is not a simple psychological event or an unsuccessful communication situation, it is a existential act, an act that places you, along with your fundamental values ​​and capabilities, over the precipice. There is no deeper resentment, and no moment when you are closer to turning affection into thick, festering hatred and frustration. The best and most dedicated teachers are not immune to this danger. But the best and most loyal are those who will not take their “children” and their parents for granted. Because here and then, in the moment when you probably have the most right to feel down, you choose to be able, not to return evil for evil, to be a breach in the matrix, a co-textual Zen master supported by a staff of hope.

Teachers have the right to be heard. They have the right to express their despair and frustration and deserve the sympathy and support of society. Often convicted by an exclusive and binary logic of right and wrong, crucified on crosses of public shame, they are found guilty without a real right to a defense. Intended to be ideal projections, they are not given space, time and forms for dialogue, for compromise, to reveal to society all the moral and psychological complexity of their situation. Their experience of disenchantment is often radically and blindly challenged, including within the teaching staff, where you will immediately be treated as an outcast if you abandon the whiny complacency and condemnation of the “beds”. The same people who applaud the performances ex cathedra teachers usually talk about laziness, the same society that judges deep hopeless situations with the sick tools of overly general schemes will quickly and superficially remove the suffering and dilemmas of teachers. And then, squeezed in generalization, pointing the finger, the teachers respond, by turns generalizing, judging from above, deepening the trenches between themselves and society, until they turn them into trenches. For me, a complex situation like the one we are in, a situation of “fragmented responsibility” and blurring, requires intelligence, tact, diplomacy, clarity (procedural, moral, axiological) and courage. Above all, the courage to see that the “Jews” are not so different from us and that there are no innocents in this war. Also, as long as everyone wants to die in his arms with his grain of truth, things remain irremediably blocked, and our essential research cannot go beyond the form of grids that only have yes or no options. – Read the entire article and comment on Contributors.ro