A torrid September

The start of the new school year is an im­por­tant time in the life of any coun­try and a chal­lenge for the ad­min­is­tra­tion in charge. Even more so in the times we live in, with the last two school years se­ri­ously al­tered by the im­pact of the pan­demic. Al­though the main news is the re­turn to nor­mal­ity so de­sired by stu­dents, teach­ers and par­ents alike, the path to it has not been an easy one. The ten­sions be­tween the unions and the ed­u­ca­tion au­thor­i­ties and the threat of a strike at all lev­els of ed­u­ca­tion in protest over the ed­u­ca­tion sec­re­tary, Josep Gonzàlez-Cam­bray, se­ri­ously en­dan­gered the start of the new school year and sig­nif­i­cantly af­fected the con­di­tions under which the new term be­gins. De­spite the fact that it was fi­nally pos­si­ble to start a week ear­lier than usual, as the ed­u­ca­tion de­part­ment wished, the con­flict is far from over and could es­ca­late at any mo­ment. While it is true that the unions are very crit­i­cal of the ed­u­ca­tion sec­re­tary’s man­age­ment, it is the cur­ricu­lum and the ed­u­ca­tional model that lie at the heart of the con­flict; in other words, ques­tions over which di­rec­tion learn­ing should be headed in.

The fun­da­men­tal prob­lem be­tween the teach­ers and the ad­min­is­tra­tion is the de­bate over ac­quir­ing “skills” rather than learn­ing knowl­edge and ex­pe­ri­ence. That is, what kind of cit­i­zens we should be striv­ing for and the role of the school in train­ing crit­i­cal cit­i­zens and strength­en­ing democ­racy. The con­trary view sees schools as mere sup­pli­ers of an un­crit­i­cal labour force in the ser­vice of con­sumerism. It is no minor de­bate - and the role of teach­ers has often been be­lit­tled by con­fus­ing it with le­git­i­mate work de­mands - but it is now a nec­es­sary one, and much more so when so­ci­ety is threat­ened by un­wanted changes and trans­for­ma­tions with un­pre­dictable out­comes as a re­sult of the cli­mate and eco­nomic crises. We may have re­turned to a cer­tain nor­mal­ity, but dur­ing the pan­demic we learned that things would never be the same again. And the start of the new school year in Cat­alo­nia has pro­vided more than a clear demon­stra­tion of this.