CIVIL – Center for Freedom continuously receives reports from the field in regards to the catastrophic situation of the education in Macedonia and the discrimination of teachers and students. The Ministry of Education and Science continues to have an ignorant attitude towards all the stakeholders that should contribute to the development of the education system.

Based on reports of the CIVIL teams, we learn about the politicized administrative and teaching staff in the schools, about the pressure, the threats and the blackmail that are bringing professors and teachers in a degrading position.

According to our information, schools in Western Macedonia are also experiencing party dictated overstaffing and dismissals of politically neutral teachers with no explanation of whatsoever, along with party agitations and pressures.

In the primary and secondary schools of a municipality in Western Macedonia, inadequate staff is being employed from among the lines of the ruling party. At the same time, teachers working without contracts, but with full time hours, are getting fired.

With the start of the year, intensive employments in schools have also started in this part of Macedonia. Often with unbelievable “qualifications”. For example, a person who has graduated from the Faculty of Forestry is employed as a history teacher and is teaching history to sixth, seventh and eighth grade classes.

In another primary school within the same city, six employees who had been part of the intensive employments in the previous year, all received employment contracts. For this purpose, the schools had been forming classes with of about five to ten students, just so that they could find a job and keep the newly employed. Based on that decision, a teacher teaching Macedonian language in the same school was fired from her work without any explanation. The teacher requested an answer from the school’s principal in regards to that decision, and about the attitude towards her. After four years of working full time hours, the employed teacher received a reply from the principal that a “financially weaker” teacher had been employed in her position and that this teacher needed the job much more than she did. The newly employed teacher immediately received a contract.

According to reports of the teams of CIVIL from cities across Macedonia, the employments that the authorities are carrying out on the basis of the “existential situation” of the political, religious and gender orientation and to the disadvantage of the students, are causing cruel discrimination that should be strongly condemned.

As an organization that fights for human rights and freedoms, including also labor rights, CIVIL will continue to disclose all examples of such behavior of all those who make unlawful decisions.

Our interlocutors wished to remain anonymous, but we welcome their determination, overcoming of their fear and their assistance in uncovering the toxic influence of the government, which has entirely politicized the education system in Macedonia.