We are celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Debats d’Educació by giving the educational community the opportunity to air its views
I am a teacher, and this is what I want to be.
At present, I am working as best I can in support of education and education professionals as general secretary of the Education Federation of the trade union CCOO in Catalonia.
The last book that José Manuel Esteve wrote is entitled Educar, un compromiso con la memoria (Educating, a commitment to memory). The main idea is clearly expressed in the title. Those of us who teach care about the good of those we aim to teach.
Ultimately, educating consists in teaching others to live. For this purpose, parents and educators need to refine our thinking until we succeed in obtaining a personal reply to the ultimate question that we must all answer: in what does a worthy life consist?
According to a popular saying: To educate by example is not one way to educate, it is the only way to educate.
The rest is instructing, training... Of necessity, education is an ethical activity with ethical content.
Human culture is a collective reality, and the recreation of culture in each human being takes place through connection to the social network. We learn from the present and from the past. Therefore:
Segregation operates against the construction of knowledge.
Cooperation is more productive and fairer than competition. (Jordi Bascompte)
We are a node in the network, and we would be wise to activate all the nodes for the benefit of the education of each person. The whole tribe is required to educate a child. We must take an active role in the construction of educational community.
Our own pedagogical savoir-faire is also constructed and recreated collectively. It is important to work in teams, and to have projects that are sufficiently diverse so that they are sufficiently rich.
With the facilities provided by ICT and people’s physical mobility, we have enormous opportunities for connection and collective construction of knowledge and culture.
We need to redesign the continuous training of teachers as a process of Training, research, action (Ángel I. Pérez Gómez). Above all, the teacher is an intellectual at the intersection of knowledge and culture, an intellectual who reflects on science, culture and art as instruments of creative adaptation to reality...
I propose a professional career, linked with an academic degree course that recognizes and promotes training, research and innovation (based on teaching practice with pupils), in the European arena of higher education and research.
This option can motivate professionals from a personal and academic point of view, as well in terms of professional recognition and financial retribution. It is also a powerful mechanism for the evaluation and correction of teaching practice on the basis of tested empirical evidence.