EKIP– Expert Club for Economics and Politics A Different Opinion
Yavor Ganchev
A talented, dedicated, and qualified teacher is a great tool for achieving quality, effective, and adequate education. However, a good tool is not, in itself, a sufficient condition for a good result.
The quality of education is measured by the satisfaction of the learner. And satisfaction comes from achieving one's own goals, not someone else's. Therefore, even the most dedicated teacher cannot make the student happy if the student is not learning what he wants.
The effectiveness of education depends on the extent to which learning occurs through participation in real activities freely chosen by the learner. Therefore, even the most qualified teacher cannot use his or her skills if learners are placed in an environment where they cannot take initiative, make decisions, and make mistakes.
The adequacy of education depends on how well it meets the values of the community and how well the community truly lives by those values. Therefore, even the most talented teacher cannot benefit his student from inadequate educational content - he must be able to select and create his own educational content and curricula that meet the needs of the local community and individual students.
Educational outcomes depend not just on the performance of teachers, but on whether they work in a free or unfree environment. Good teachers are important, but the freedom to manage your own education is more important.
Insisting that “teachers are the most important thing for a quality education” is like insisting that it is enough to get the best tools to do everything that someone can do with those tools. Is this obviously stupid insistence an expression of stupidity? Of course not. Insisting on something important in itself, but secondary – the qualifications, qualities, salaries of teachers – serves to shift the focus from what is fundamentally important – freedom in education.
Freedom in education is the last thing the Ministry of Education wants, therefore the Ministry of Education does not actually want quality education. It only wants us to believe that the quality of education depends on preserving the status quo, in which all public resources for education are concentrated at the tip of the minister's pen. And it needs nearly 130,000 employees in the education system to be the upholders of this status quo.
This is being achieved surprisingly easily so far - with flattery about how important teachers are (but not enough to rent them a hotel or pay them overtime), with declarations about how education will become a "national priority" (definitely from next year) and with promises of raising salaries (after the elections). The shockingly humiliating way in which 12,000 teachers were gathered - and for no other reason than to explain to them exactly what kind of work they will be able to do from next month and to promise them something that turned out not to be the case the very next day - would have been tantamount to political suicide if teachers, in addition to being generally good professionals, were also generally free people.
The above reasoning is also valid for the other common statement that “money is the most important thing for the quality of education” - that if we raise teachers' salaries and fix the material base, this will automatically lead to quality, effective and adequate education. It will not. It will only lead to an increase in the resource at the tip of the minister's pen. Quality education is a product of free human activity, not money. Money, as well as the qualifications of teachers, are simply a resource that only free people can use wisely and responsibly.
___________________________ the picture is a mockery of a favorite meme of the Bulgarian teaching profession, which says that in Japan the only ones who were not obliged to bow to the emperor were the teachers, because without teachers there would be no emperors. In our country it is the opposite - if the emperor-MES does not indicate what exactly everyone should learn, a complete paralysis of teaching activities occurs.
