Editorial of the “World”. Almost two years following its onset, the endless Covid-19 pandemic is testing nerves in all sectors of society. But nowhere else than in national education does the perceptible exasperation reach the degree which led to the slogan of national strike on Thursday, January 13. That all the unions in the public school system, SGEN-CFDT included, all levels – elementary and secondary – and all categories of staff – teachers and supervisors – show the same anger is exceptional.
Made public the day before the start of the Monday January 3 school year, the new protocol which required parents to have their children tested, three times, as soon as they are in contact, and the school institution to manage the consequences of these tests , quickly proved impractical in the context of the explosion of contagion linked to the Omicron variant. Not only for parents, forced to juggle queues in pharmacies and children to recover urgently from school with all business ceasing, but also for teachers, accumulating the shocks of disorganized classes, an unbearable bureaucracy and of a minister pretending to ignore the big mess.
The Prime Minister announced, Monday evening, the simplification of the protocol. Self-tests replace those carried out in pharmacies. But the regarding-face, which above all lightens the task of parents, has not defused the call to strike. This risks disrupting the school a little more, but it results from the stubbornness of a minister who is too sure of himself, incapable of recognizing the extreme difficulties on the ground and of lavishing the indispensable words of encouragement. How might he have used the derogatory term of“Absenteeism” to qualify the absences due to the Covid, at the very moment when it should have mobilized the professors?
Cumbersome and inefficient system
By refusing to admit the unrealism of his protocol, Jean-Michel Blanquer has undermined, to the chagrin of the President of the Republic, the political capital that constitutes the undeniable success of his “open school” during the Covid. The Omicron wave, its explosive contagiousness and its lesser dangerousness should not however call into question this slogan which has enabled France to avoid the generational catastrophe observed in certain countries. The surge of the new variant, which supposes rapid adaptation and management as close as possible to the field, underlines, once once more, the cumbersome and ineffectiveness of a school system from which each actor expects, if only for the denounce, instructions supposed to respond to each situation.
Today, teachers’ unions calling for closures of classes as soon as the first case of Covid is reported should recognize that this would lead to a widespread lockout from the school that no one wants. As for the executive, he should admit that his new system of self-tests amounts to letting the virus circulate, for lack of another possible choice.
But achieving such realism on both sides is hardly possible in a climate of tension where the school stakeholders have the feeling that no one understands their exhaustion. And where a minister tries to play parents once morest teachers by suggesting that it is the latter, and not the virus, who are turning national education upside down. If the battle of Covid at school can be won, it is through recognition and not through mistrust.
