and are shamefully underpaid . It would be enough to compare their salaries with those of any officer from the Armed Forces or the Ministry of Interior . But this is hardly one of the many nonsenses that led to the mass exodus from the education system , especially the most competent and experienced teachers . A mere opinion survey among them ( I did one in due time ) would be enough to know , for example , that the main cause for leaving the classrooms was not the salary , but the fact that their professionalism and moral principles did not allow them to adhere to certain rules and impositions within the system . Among the causes of their discontent stands out the way in which , arbitrarily and without room for dispute , they were forced for years to give a passing grade to the immense majority of the students , even those who were not devoted to study and showed very poor performances and absolute lack of knowledge . The teachers had to guarantee the highest pass rates at any cost . The cold number was imposed and is still imposed to the good offices of the educator . I have personally listened to many of those professionals describing a scandalous , rigid , mediocre , and incontestable spiral , according to which the principal gave them such orders in response to the demand of the education department at the municipality , which in turn responded to the leadership in the province , which followed the instructions issued by the Ministry of Education , which obeys the guidelines given by the government , because it ’ s politically needed to inflate the statistics to mislead the world public opinion . These old teachers massively left the classrooms and renounced to their lifelong vocation , but they also declared that they were sick and tired with the unreasonable ideologization that prevailed in each standard , in each assessment , in each project of the national education system . They were also sick and tired with the antipedagogical , dogmatic , manipulative , chauvinistic and brutalizing program designs and the regulations for teaching the curriculum . They asserted that the point is not the shortcomings , as the official discourse has stated sometimes , but the conscientiously decreed basic abnormalities that they had to put in force against their specialized criteria and ethical principles . They even found themselves in the delicate position of standing up for such abnormalities , as visible talking heads of a system whose rules they did not share , because they had no right to fix anything since they were never even consulted with due respect . It is equally well known that , before the systematic exodus of the old teachers , the government was obliged to replace them with others poorly trained , sometimes very young , almost children . It also tried in vain to recover them , but without eliminating or amending the main causes of their discontent . It merely offered them lukewarm salary improvements . As usual . The government systematically destroy cities for decades , and then it pretends to disguise their ruins in the most slipshod manner with improvisations in a hurry . It erodes the soil , spending many years in thorough work for turning it into wasteland , and its officials wake up one morning and accuse the peasants of being unproductive . Likewise , the government dismantle , with conquerors ’ indolence , the best traditions along with all the cultural structures , and then they hurry up to build good qualities . Per the official media , that is a priority of the education system nowadays : to build good qualities in the children , as an imperative imposed by the loss of values hanging over the Cubans like a plague . The truth is that if the government would understand as
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