There are additional reasons to admire those who forge future generations from the classroom.   Photo: Granma newspaper

By Roberto Morejón 

Teacher's Day, which is celebrated every year in Cuba on December 22nd, encourages school directors, parents and institutions to further praise the figure of teachers and professors.

If their work is praiseworthy at any time, in times of pandemic it is more striking, useful and decisive, because, as in other countries, in Cuba it has been necessary to interrupt the school year and students had to limit themselves to classes on television.

Now, when Cuba has recovered face-to-face teaching thanks to the control of the new coronavirus with the application of its own vaccines, the teacher's task shines again, because he/she must reconcile different learning assimilations during confinement.

Thus, educators test their experience, knowledge and skills to reorient their students towards a better understanding of the concepts, even under the challenges of SARS-Cov-2.

But in Cuba such challenges are accepted by an educational system characterized by being free and inclusive and which must reconcile massiveness with quality.

On Teacher's Day, which evokes December 22, 1961, when the news of the successful completion of the Literacy Campaign was announced, there are additional reasons to admire those who forge future generations from the classroom.

It will be imperative, moreover, to enhance the performance of that anonymous mentor who for years has been teaching in an intricate area, of those who go to other countries on missions of collaboration and of the retirees returning, to mitigate the deficit and all classrooms remain open.

With motivated preceptors, it is also hoped to achieve what is still a pretension, that every student will behave appropriately in and out of school.

They are expected to learn to read and write correctly, solve mathematical equations, unravel history, handle computers and be inspired by Moral and Civics, because they must also be honest, detached, respectful, fraternal and caring.

Families, the cradle of enlightenment, are in the first instance to inculcate these values, but the Antillean educational system also has a determining role, for being a paradigm of altruism and promoting the dignity of human growth.