Our View: What are schools if not human centred?

Speaking about her plans for the next school year, Education Minister Athena Michaelidou set as a ministry priority “the transition to a modern, human-centred and inclusive school that will cultivate abilities, skills and knowledge.”

Was she implying that public schools, until now, had not been ‘human-centred’? What have they been all these years if not ‘human-centred’? They may have not been centred on the children but the teachers, but they are human as well. She probably did not say that schools would become child-centred in case the teaching unions took offence, feeling that their rights and conquests were at risk.

The reality is that the minister was merely repeating the government’s propaganda slogan. This dreaded term had been used incessantly by President Nikos Christodoulides during his election campaign and subsequently when publicly talking about his government’s plans and policies – they would always have people at their centre. Ministers must also have been instructed to use the term when discussing policies in public, because through repetition people would associate it with the government.

Finance Minister Makis Keravnos regularly uses this term to describe his economic policies, which should worry everyone. Economic policies should be centred on increasing productivity and efficiency, ensuring the smooth operation of the market and creating conditions for businesses to flourish. None of this would be achieved if they were ‘human-centred’ given that most people want to take maximum pay for minimum work. The public service is organised along those lines, but if private businesses followed this business model they would go bankrupt and humans would suffer.

The last government to pursue ‘human-centred’ policies was that of Demetris Christofias and everyone remembers how that ended. Admittedly, it was Akel which first coined this meaningless phrase as a critique of market capitalism, which placed profit above people, ignoring the fact that it is thanks to profit-making businesses that economies grow and improve living standards.

Politicians often praised the co-ops for being human-centred credit organisations because they did not force their customers to pay back their loans. The result of this caring, human-centred banking model, which completely ignored the basic rules of the market, was bankruptcy, at a huge cost to the taxpayer.

Talking about ‘human-centred’ policies is still considered a way of winning public support, otherwise the publicity conscious Christodoulides government would not use the term at all times and for all purposes. For now it is just a nice-sounding slogan, but we should start to worry if and when the government actually takes it seriously and starts pursuing policies that are aimed at pleasing people rather than ensuring the rational operation of the economy.