La Voz de Galicia – October 5, 2018 →
I still remember Ms. Dolores reading articles from the newspaper to us, her kindergarten students at the Parque das Mercedes public school. I remember her fondness—her affection for us—her way of dealing with us. I remember that to teach us to read, she used whatever was around her, and I suppose that the newspaper was an available tool at a time when resources at public schools were quite scarce and a teacher’s vocation became the sole fundamental tool in education.
Teachers’ impact on our lives is incalculable. At times, the vital decision to choose the sciences or the humanities was directly linked with a teacher’s passion for their discipline. But we are all teachers, whether we want to or not; we teach with or way of being and behaving because the calling to teach and to share is a part of our human nature: as parents, children, brothers and sisters, friends or relatives, we always learn from one another, from something shared.
Today, UNESCO celebrates World Teachers’ Day, and according to their official data, there is a shortage of qualified teachers in the most vulnerable zones: it appears that more than 69 million educators are needed to meet their objectives by 2030.
I don’t know if Ourense may be considered to have a “vulnerable population,” but the fact that it has one of the most elderly population in Europe makes the plan to train millions of teachers by 2030 as remote as it is sad: how many children will Ourense—or Galicia—have in twenty years? What changes are necessary for our social politics to stop disappearing? What is it that we have to learn?
