Steven N.“I should not be threatened by the minister whose job it is to work for me,” Budapest teacher Edit Simkó told RTL News after she published a letter on Facebook urging her teacher colleagues to resign:
Join together and drop off your letters of resignation, which you will make subject to conditions: free and modern education, salaries worthy of intellectuals, and a bearable workload.
-Simkó wrote in the post that she addressed to educators, parents, and Hungarian citizens.
Simkó told RTL that this rallying cry was the only way they could reach the Minister of the Interior, the new person responsible for public education. At his recent committee hearing, Pintér said that he considered the civil disobedience activity engaged in by schoolteachers since the start of the year to be a disciplinary issue.
Elizabeth Nagy, head of the Democratic Union of Teachers, suggested to RTL that teachers who are considering resigning should do so together, visibly, and set a specific deadline.
Edit Simkó was among the first to engage in the civil disobedience movement by educators in February that spread across the country to protest a government decree eliminating teachers’ right to strike.
Last week, the government proposed an amendment to the Public Education Law that would make the decree entrenched into law. [HVG]
