A series of very intense rounds of “negotiations” have been taking place in Cyprus over the last month, between the Government and the teachers’ unions. The objective of the negotiations is the rationalization of spending in education.
I used the quotes around the word “negotiations” on purpose. And that is because in my view one can only talk about negotiations when two parties with differing views meet up, discuss, make mutual concessions and -depending on their negotiating skills and power- meet each other somewhere around the middle.
“Mutual” is the key word in my definition of negotiations above.
For years now, Cyprus appears to be among the top EU spenders on education. Yet year after year, the academic performance of our youth (as measured by their graduation grades) deteriorates. The reason why Cyprus is forced to spend so much on education is because of a set of completely unreasonable and outdated rules that say that as years pass, teachers are “entitled” (God knows how much I abhor this word) to less teaching time. This means that more teachers need to be hired in order to fill in for those who merely sit around and get paid. And this is happening all the while every other class of professionals need to work for more years due to the inevitable increase of retirement age in all western countries. Furthermore, those who participate in unions, are also exempted from teaching. (And we have three of those unions for a population of less than a million people mind you.) Then again, judging from the quality of the people leading those unions, perhaps it’s for the best that they don’t teach – keep reading and you’ll understand what I mean…
One of the initial counter arguments that the teachers used, was that the spending on education isn’t so high, because there’s a number of expenses unrelated to education that are registered under the Ministry Of Education (“MOE”). That, I found to be a valid argument, so I was waiting for more details on it from the part of the teachers, when they announced their counter-proposals to the MOE. Yet no further mention was made on it, which leads me to believe that their initial claims were likely exaggerations that couldn’t be corroborated by real-life data. Instead, the main proposals that came from teachers were the increase of the recruitment rate of new teachers and of the number of students per classroom.
The problem here is that none of the teachers’ counter-proposals did anything to “hurt” their own interests. They didn’t “give” anything to their counterparty to get something back in return. They used the negotiations as an opportunity to demand more for themselves. They have long before stopped serving a purpose (the betterment of our educational system as a whole which would, in turn, lead to the betterment of their well-being) and started serving an agenda instead: To promote their personal interests in any way possible.
People serving an agenda, no matter which agenda this may be, are dangerous and should be marginalized. Some of their arguments may indeed be well-founded and useful to consider, but you should avoid engaging in a conversation with them, simply because their aim is not to converse, but to promote their agenda, thereby leading to you wasting your time. To paraphrase Patton, when a group of people thinks in the same way, it means that the group’s participants have long since stopped thinking altogether.
No matter what happens in the end, once these “negotiations” are over, the real work should start: A true dialogue that will address the most important of all questions: “What kind of educational system we want for our children?” But that is a very big discussion and I will thus reserve my ideas in relation to it for another post.