Mischief in the classrooms

WELL, what a relief. The pupils must be delighted, the teachers must be chuckling at the guise of their protest. The former don’t have to listen to, the latter don’t have to read, the edifying missives from the Ministry of Education. Let’s face it, it was a chore, a boring formality dreaded by all involved.

You know the new school year is upon us when teaching unions begin to threaten industrial action over this or that reform from their bosses at the ministry. The form of this year’s protest is particularly imaginative, if somewhat petty: they’ll ignore Minister Pefkios Georgiades if he visits their schools (it must be hard to pretend you haven’t seen the tallest member of the Cabinet) and they’ll refuse to read out his messages.

Give us a break. It’s time the unions began collaborating with the ministry to haul the public education system out of the black hole in which it languishes. Union action is always for the benefit of its members (whose working conditions are already the envy of colleagues in the private sector), never for improvements in the system. When children no longer need systematic private lessons to make it through their education, then the unions can offer themselves the luxury of this kind of petty dispute with the government.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.