Around the middle of the last century, Winston Churchill aptly said: “Headmasters have powers at their disposal with which Prime Ministers have never yet been invested.” The great politician was referring, of course, to the power that a school teacher has over the minds of their students… but in Churchill’s times there was no Google, no YouTube and no TikTok…
Today, education, like many areas of our lives, is undergoing numerous and very painful transformations – and it cannot be said that all the changes are for the better. And quite often, lately, there have been video manifestos of teachers who defiantly quit, not wanting to put up with what is happening. This story is one of those.
More info: TikTok
The author of the video is a school teacher with 24 years of experience – but she recently quit
According to the author, the main problem is the new type of parents who actually don’t care for their kids’ education
So, the Original Poster (OP), the TikToker @fitpeanut, according to herself, is a school teacher with 24 years of experience, and on the day the video was published she officially quit. The author of the video claims that she planned to leave a long time ago, but wanted to wait until the end of the school year. However, her patience didn’t last…
According to the OP, the main reason why work in the profession to which she devoted so many years and effort has become unbearable is the parents. Yes, a new generation of parents with whom she has to deal literally every day.
Parents who consider it normal not to give their kid a pen or notebook to take to school – but at the same time demand a completely special attitude towards themselves and their child in class. While the OP has three dozen of these kids in the classroom at the same time. And more than one hundred over the whole working day.
According to the teacher (okay, now a former teacher), it’s absolutely impossible in the existing school education system to satisfy the needs of literally every kid – if only because these needs are different for each of the thirty children in the class, and are often mutually exclusive.
“Your expectations are unrealistic. They are altruistic, and you’re wearing rose-colored glasses, it is not going to happen”
“If you want that, then I suggest you homeschool or maybe send them to a private school. In a public school education, it isn’t going to happen,” the original poster states pessimistically. “And if you think it’s going to happen, you’re fooling yourself. Get off the backs of your teachers.”
Well, if forty-odd years ago Pink Floyd sang: “Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!” and it was damn relevant, then now the legendary hit is definitely outdated. It is replaced by desperate attempts by the teacher to organize a normal educational process in the classroom.
According to the original poster from another of her videos (which, by the way, has become even more viral, gaining over 1.1M views as of today), she spends about 20 minutes of each lesson actually teaching kids. And that’s if she’s lucky. Everything else is a constant struggle for the children’s attention, desperate attempts to turn them into ears.
The teacher laments that she constantly has to deal with kids who don’t care – simply because their parents don’t care, and she sees no way out of this vicious circle. “Teaching has become a dying profession,” the author sadly states.
It turns out, education systems around the world have undergone significant changes in the 21st century – and not all the changes have been for the better
“Yes, if we compare school education in almost any country, a lot has changed over the past couple of decades. In fact, the teacher has to compete for the students’ attention with a huge variety of other factors – social networks, messengers, videos,” says Volodymyr Nemertsalov, a school principal and teacher from Ukraine, with whom Bored Panda got in touch for a comment here. “Moreover, today’s kids often have a lower degree of concentration – simply because there are way more distractions around them than there were when their parents were kids themselves.”
“In addition, now schoolchildren also have way more sources of information – and information received not from a teacher will not always be truthful and reasonable. The teacher has ceased to be a verified source of knowledge – that’s another problem. And I frankly don’t know how to solve these problems,” Volodymyr ponders.
Okay, let’s look at the numbers. According to data collected by the USA Facts, 8th grade math and reading proficiency fell between 2019 and 2022 to the lowest rates in at least 15 years. At the same time, the public-school student-teacher ratio dropped from 15.9 in fall 2019 to 15.4 in fall 2020 and remained unchanged in 2021.
“Education has changed so much that it is unbearable,” our heroine sums up. “And that’s why there’s a teacher shortage. I have seen education change in 24 years and it hasn’t changed for the better.”
Watch the full video here
@fitpeanut #teacherstiktok #teachersquitting #foryou #teacherburnout #teach #education #teacher ♬ original sound – Teacher,Teacher
People in the comments mostly supported the original poster, agreeing that the quality of school education has only declined in recent years. “Teachers are sounding an alarm and society isn’t listening,” one of the commenters wrote. “Just retired after 37 years of teaching. Well said! Parents just don’t get it!” another person added.
According to some of the author’s colleagues in the comments, the main problem isn’t the children per se. More precisely, not at all children. “I taught grade 8 last year. I’m done. It wasn’t even the kids. It was the parents and admin,” another commenter wrote. And what do you, our dear readers, think about this particular story and the situation with school education in general?
People in the comments mostly sided with the author, claiming that the education quality per se is rather a big social issue nowadays
