The ninth grader was waiting with her father in front of the staff room, and Salvatore Caruso, principal at the Edith Stein Comprehensive School in Offenbach, noticed as soon as he got closer that the pupil's father was under extreme pressure.

He walked past the two into the room where the student's teachers had gathered for a class conference.

They wanted to decide whether they would exclude the student from the graduation trip due to serious misconduct.

But suddenly the father opened the door, stormed in and hit the table in front of him with the palm of his hand, reports Caruso.

"He yelled at me: 'What's on your mind?'" Caruso says he then smacked the table with his palm and shouted: "But that's the end of it!"

"he asked, 'Do you have a problem?

You don't treat me like that!'” When he asked him to leave the staff room, the father made preparations to pull a chair over his head.

Finally, with the help of a colleague, he pushed him out of the staff room, and in the hallway in front, his father took off his jacket and called: "Come out, we can fix this right away!"

Catherine Hummel

Editor in the "Life" department of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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This incident from Offenbach is just one example among many.

According to a representative study commissioned by the Education and Training Association, both verbal and physical violence against teachers increased significantly between 2018 and 2020.

Overall, around 60 percent of school principals stated that in the last five years there had been cases in which teachers had been verbally abused, threatened, insulted, bullied or harassed.

In 2018, only 45 percent said so.

23 percent of school managements recently reported physical attacks against teachers, compared to 16 percent in 2018.

And things have gotten much worse during the pandemic.

The teachers were attacked for enforcing the Corona rules.

“There is a change in values”

Teachers from Thuringia report that while the corona measures were being enforced, they were compared to the concentration camp employees who stood at the ramp in Buchenwald 80 years ago.

Or they had been told that they were like the Wall Riflemen who only carried out orders.

A school management had to hear that they were running their school with Nazi methods.

A father launched a hate campaign against his children's school on Messenger Telegram, so that strangers threatened and insulted the school management.

Other teachers were insulted, spat on, threatened, beaten or kicked in the stomach.

The reason for such behavior should of course not only be the corona pandemic.

According to the German Teachers' Association, violence against teachers is increasing, especially in troubled schools.

Many students there come from families who live in precarious circumstances.

It is children who repeatedly witness physical violence, for example between their parents.

Such children and young people are more likely to become violent themselves than others.