Thiès, March 9 (APS) – Academic and writer Andrée Marie Diagne has called on education stakeholders to “ward off the specter” of the long-running teachers’ strike, which has distressed students across the country for three months.
“We must remove this specter, our students must not be in distress, we are responsible for their future,” said Andrée Marie Diagne, during the opening ceremony of the 5th edition of the International Fair. of the book of Thiès (SILT), of which she is the godmother.
The opening of this meeting initiated by Fama Editions, in collaboration with the Senegalese Association of Publishers, recorded a strong presence of teachers, students and personalities from the literary world.
”We teachers were out of class, but it was the students who demanded our return to class. Where did you see that, dear colleagues? it’s a terrible event, a terrible moment that we experienced and we don’t want such things to happen again!”, regretted Andrée Marie Diagne.
Emphasizing that the raison d’être of teachers is to “take charge” of the country’s youth, even if their condition is “difficult”, she recalled that after obtaining her CAES, with two master’s degrees in her pocket, she ”did not earn 100,000 francs”.
”And we did not strike more than three days a year, and when there were three days of strike, it was an event,” she continued, not without being taken aback: ‘ ‘but three months of strike, can you imagine that!”.
The one who trained several generations of teachers at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), which became the Faculty of Sciences and Techniques of Education and Training (FASTEF), where she still works after her retirement, invites the unions of teachers to ”know how to negotiate” and to ”look for other means of struggle”.
For her, the African palaver tree must be used to reach consensus and ”save our society, our youth, our school”.
The academic underlined the pleasure of seeing his former students succeed and occupy high levels of responsibility, evoking as an example, that of her husband Professor Mame Moussé Diagne to find during this ceremony, the current mayor of Thiès who was his student in the philosophy department of the Cheikh-Anta-Diop University in Dakar.
For her part, she had by her side Demba Faye, the chief of staff of the Minister of Culture and Communication, who was her student at Van-Vo high school.