Who do schools in Cyprus really serve?
Are they for teachers to work, or for students to learn? I put forward this extreme proposition not as a political or pedagogical critique, but rather as a reflection of a growing voice of protest increasingly heard in Cypriot society.
The right to strike to improve working conditions for education professionals is to be respected. Yet, at the same time, the education system appears to be drifting away from its primary purpose: the learning, progress, and needs of the student.
We live in a country where lost teaching time is considered “normal”, where evaluation is seen as a threat rather than a tool for improvement, and where the curriculum often feels detached from the reality of children’s lives.
Schools continue to emphasise rote learning, syllabus coverage, and examinations, even as students inhabit a digital, multifaceted environment full of stimuli, anxieties, and rapid changes. Issues that truly concern them - social media, the climate crisis, job insecurity, artificial intelligence, among others - rarely find meaningful inclusion in the learning process.
For example, recently in a secondary school in Nicosia, during a Year 8 history lesson on the Justinian period, the teacher assigned seven questions for students to answer as preparation for a pre-announced test the following day. We can all recognise that perhaps the most significant emperor of the Byzantine era, whose laws, institutions, and symbols outlasted his time, would, once the test was over, soon return to oblivion.
In short, we educate students using a method that replaces thinking with memorisation and turns learning into a mechanical process. Students can repeat information without truly understanding it. Knowledge remains superficial and is quickly forgotten because it is not connected to meaning, experience, or prior knowledge. Students often learn “to be examined” rather than to understand. Schools become grade-producing machines rather than knowledge centres. And when learning loses its meaning, students lose interest.
Learning
Who are schools in Cyprus for, if their core goal is not achieved? This is not an attack on teachers as individuals, nor a blanket disparagement of a profession that has contributed greatly to the country. The problem is systemic. It concerns how education, as an institution, has gradually strayed from its fundamental purpose: the child’s learning.
In Cyprus, schools often function more as administrative machines than as living pedagogical institutions. Timetables, circulars, regulations, union balances, and bureaucracy shape daily life far more than the needs of the classroom. The educational process seems to have adapted to the system, not the system to the student. Students attend school to keep teachers, technicians, cleaners, and Ministry of Education inspectors occupied.
Lost teaching hours are treated almost as “normality”. Strikes, work stoppages, in-school training, examinations, events, endless rehearsals for national celebrations, and delayed substitutions all subtract from teaching time, with the cost to students rarely seriously assessed.
The absence of accountability
In any other public sector, evaluation is considered self-evident. In education, however, the word “evaluation” provokes almost allergic reactions. Not because it is unnecessary, but because it has been wrongly associated with punishment, leaving the system trapped in a self-protective logic.
The result is an educational environment where effort and inertia are often treated the same. Where principals refuse to evaluate their staff. Where innovation depends on the goodwill of individual teachers rather than a structured framework of incentives. Where teaching quality is not genuinely assessed or systematically improved, as inspector evaluations are rare and often inadequate.
The student at the margins
Curricula, in many cases, remain stuck in past decades. At the same time, alongside arguably stronger symbolic influences, schools implement hidden programmes dictated by the Church and other outdated nationalist groups, encouraged and supported by the Ministry of Education and school principals.
Most concerning is the near-total absence of the student’s voice in these discussions. Decisions are made for children, without children. Their mental health - which can be disrupted by unstable family environments (one in three marriages in Cyprus ends in divorce) - learning difficulties, and social inequalities often carried into school are frequently treated as “side issues”.
A modern school, however, cannot ignore that students are not all the same. They do not all learn in the same way, nor start from the same point. When the system fails to adapt, it fails in its most basic role: providing equal opportunities.
Caught in the same trap
Paradoxically, teachers themselves are often trapped in the same system, which treats them more as employees than as educators. It fails to provide meaningful training, fair evaluation, or encouragement to innovate. Teachers themselves become part of a problematic society, moving away from rationality - one of humanity’s greatest achievements. They are cogs in a Cypriot society steeped in ritual, superstition, and trivial obsessions.
As a result, instead of acting as agents of change, many teachers adapt to a culture of reproducing underdevelopment. They expend minimal effort, cynically accepting that compliance benefits them. Not out of desire or indifference, but exhaustion and lack of motivation.
The discussion
Cyprus has long avoided a serious, honest discussion about education - one without ideological taboos or union red lines. A discussion that asks the fundamental question: what kind of school do we want, and for whom?
If the answer does not start and end with the student, something is fundamentally wrong. Education is not an employment programme; it is an investment in the future of society and the country.
The centre of gravity
As long as the system continues to protect itself first and the student second, disappointment will grow, inequalities will deepen, and public schools will gradually lose society’s trust.
The phrase “schools exist for teachers to work, not for students to learn” is not an absolute truth, but it is a warning. If it is not heeded in time, it risks becoming a widely held belief - and then the damage will be far harder to repair.
This article was originally published in the Politis Sunday Edition.