What we celebrate on October 5th

October 5, 2026, falls on a Monday. Mid-morning, between the second period and recess, the school mail will distribute its share of congratulations: one from the management platform, wishing you a happy day and taking the opportunity to remind you of its updates; one from a publisher, with a printable poster; perhaps an institutional circular with solemn typography. In the staff room, someone will read it aloud, and a colleague —let's call her Marta, who has been teaching Language in Secondary School for twenty-two years— will summarize the general feeling with a phrase that is already a classic of the profession: «Congratulate me less and free me from paperwork».

A day born with a letterhead

Marta has a point. And yet this day deserves more than a half-smile, because almost no one remembers exactly what is being celebrated. October 5 is not just another occurrence on the calendar of world days, that secular liturgy that designates days to jazz or the radio. The date commemorates a document: the joint Recommendation concerning the Status of Teachers that the ILO and UNESCO adopted on October 5, 1966, following an intergovernmental conference convened in Paris. It was the first international text to take seriously defining what a teacher is: what training they deserve, what conditions they need, what participation is theirs to have in educational decisions, and what respect the society they serve owes them. UNESCO established the day in 1994, and since then has convened it every year alongside the ILO, UNICEF, and Education International.

It is worth keeping this origin in mind because it changes the nature of the day. It was not born as a sentimental tribute, but as a claim with a letterhead. The 1966 text speaks of salaries, stability, the number of students per classroom, and professional freedom. Those who signed it were not thinking of mugs with pretty quotes: they were thinking that teaching is a skilled profession that is sustained, or collapses, under concrete conditions. Celebrating October 5 is, strictly speaking, reading that contract once again.

And this year it is worth rereading it for a reason: the 2026 edition marks the sixtieth anniversary of that Recommendation, which UNESCO is currently revising to bring it up to date in the face of what has emerged since then —the digital sphere, climate, inclusion, migration—. The organization itself arranges the matter into three dimensions that any teacher will immediately recognize: the symbolic, when the profession does not receive the recognition it deserves; the professional, marked by limited autonomy and scant participation in decisions; and the material, concerning salaries, workloads, and environments that do not allow the craft to be carried out properly.

The paradox of the Spanish teacher

Sixty years later, several clauses of the contract are still waiting, and Spain illustrates this with a paradox that international studies depict with precision. According to Spain's TALIS 2024 report, published a year ago, 95% of Secondary teachers and 97% of Primary teachers are satisfied with their work. Read that slowly: it is one of the highest rates of love for the profession recorded by any survey in any occupation. Yet this same teaching force reports that what wears them down is not the classroom, but what surrounds it: 64% in Secondary point to administrative tasks as a source of stress.

And when asked if society values their profession, 15.6% answer yes. The figure was 14.1% in 2018: six years later, the difference is so small that the OECD itself considers it statistically insignificant. In other words: nothing has changed. To calibrate the number, it is worth looking next door — the OECD country average stands at 22%. Marta fits entirely within these figures: she loves what she does, she is exhausted by what is not teaching, and she does not feel that the difference is appreciated out there.

Forty-four million absences

What in Spain is burnout, in the rest of the world is already a shortage. The Global Report on Teachers, published by UNESCO and its Teacher Task Force in 2024, put a figure on the gap: 44 million additional Primary and Secondary teachers will be needed to achieve the universal schooling by 2030 that the world promised itself; one in three of those, in sub-Saharan Africa. The figure is less striking than the trend that accompanies it: attrition among primary school teachers nearly doubled in seven years, from 4.6% in 2015 to 9% in 2022. It is not that there is a lack of people willing to teach; it is that more and more people who were teaching have decided to stop. The report itself, in proposing remedies, chooses a verb that speaks volumes about the core of the diagnosis: dignifying the profession. When an international organization has to ask in writing to dignify an occupation, it means that occupation has been treated beneath its dignity for far too long.

The staff room objection

Let us be honest about the objection that any reader in the staff room will be thinking: a world day does not fix any of this. It is true. Trade unions know this and turn every October 5 into a day of demands, and they do well to do so, because that is exactly the tradition of 1966. The real risk of the day is different: that it remains an institutional tribute, limited to posters and mugs, while the clauses of the contract remain unfulfilled. Cheap applause is the most comfortable way to avoid paying what is due.

The celebration that depends on each school

But there is something that is within reach of each school, and here the anniversary becomes interesting for a leadership team. The social valuation of the profession is played out in newscasts and budgets, where an individual school has little reach. And it is also played out, every day, in an arena where the school decides almost everything: whether a teacher's time is protected or shredded, whether the faculty is an intellectual community or a roster of duties, whether the teacher who has spent twenty years in the classroom is still nurtured in their why or written off as fully amortized. The encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, which has circulated so widely this year among schools with a defined ethos, reminds us that school offers what the digital world cannot provide on its own: “shared time for learning and reliable relationships.” Time and relationships are also what a school can give its teachers, and not only its students, without waiting for any decree.

There lies the celebration that depends on us. The October 5 worth having is the one at the school that decides its faculty’s training will not be limited to the urgent (the new platform, the protocol that just arrived) and will touch, from time to time, what is important: the big questions that once brought each teacher into the classroom. Anyone who has watched a faculty argue in earnest about a text or an idea, and not about a rubric, knows that people come back from those conversations different in class. Thenomba works with schools on that conviction: teaching vocation is neither preached nor congratulated, it is nourished; and a faculty that cultivates its own cultural background and its sense of mission not only retains teachers but begets them, because the best nursery of vocations that exists is still a student who once had in front of them a teacher with their why lit.

Perhaps that is the most serious yardstick a school can apply to itself on World Teachers’ Day. Not the average years its faculty has accumulated, nor what the poster in the lobby says, but how many of its former students have wanted to become teachers. Behind each of those names there is always a Marta who one day, between second period and recess, did something that no international document knows how to describe and that all of them, since 1966, try to protect.

So this October 5, when the email arrives with the usual greeting, read it without cynicism. Think of that conference in Paris that put in writing what you are owed. Think of the 44 million who are missing, which is the worldwide proof that what you do is not something just anyone can do. And if you run a school, do not settle for congratulating: ask your faculty what they would need to choose this profession again tomorrow. The answer will surprise you less than their gratitude for the question.

Cover image generated with artificial intelligence.