Distance education is firmly established in Greek education system. This was proven yesterday, after his immediate – Sunday afternoon – decision Ministry of Education carry out distance learning in areas where the daily work of school units has been suspended by decisions of municipalities or regions. However, there were several teachers who did not comply with the decision, claiming that they did not have the necessary equipment, and some also cited political reasons. The use of distance education has been a field of political confrontation.

In particular, the Ministry of Education, as happens in such cases, follows the decision of the local government on the possible suspension of schools for an emergency (for example, due to bad weather). “Representatives of local government are responsible for assessing the risk of weather events and the final weighting of the data on whether schools will work,” a high-ranking official of the Ministry of Education told K yesterday. The competence of the ministry includes scientific work and its payment.

37,000 classes operated

According to his information Ministry of Education, yesterday about 37,000 classes were launched online without any technical problems, platform performance issues or anything else. In fact, ministry officials said that the mechanism is ready at any time to use digital tools that have been the property of the educational community since the pandemic period. In support of its position, the ministry informally recalled that “more than 664,000 vouchers worth more than 132 million euros were issued to all teachers without any criteria, as well as to children and youth aged 4 to 24 years and used to purchase digital equipment (tablets, laptops, desktops)to ensure that everyone has access to education.” Here is how he answered the objections of the head of the education department SYRIZA – P.S. Nikos Fili, who said: “Snow is an opportunity for play and joy. This is valuable experience and knowledge. Distance education, even in those 24 hours when it snows in Athens, is imposed by those who were born and lived in old people and probably want the same for our children. It is another thing to systematically resort to distance learning for reasons of insuperable force and for a long time, and another thing to organize it once for one or two days, which breaks and disorganizes the educational act. Also, let’s be a little serious: teachers cannot prepare a real e-learning course in one day, which is so different from a classroom course. And yet the minister forces it on them on a Sunday afternoon! Exclusively and only for the sake of impressions! He added: “Certainly the ministry should not be thinking about introducing truancy registration when it is known that many homes will have difficulty connecting to class.” Most of the teachers taught “because we have the know-how and equipment of the quarantine period”, such as This was reported to “K” by philologist Leah Kholeva.. “There was no shortage of those who did not complete the online course. I believe that the state should ensure the rule of law and equality.”

At the same time, several teachers abandoned distance learning, citing only political reasons. The IOE and OLME also opposed the policies of the Ministry of Education. Significantly, the ILO accused its leadership of “communication nonsense in trying to convince the public that everything is taken care of and that everything is ready, with orders through simple messages from the education departments over the holiday weekend to keep schools open from tomorrow, despite bad weather, p. .. distance learning and requires last-minute orders to create a false image of normalcy.”