The school year begins this Monday in Catalonia for the early childhood and primary education without a new round of strikes and demonstrations on the horizon after the agreement between the Department of Education and the representative teachers’ unions to reverse the additional teaching hour introduced a decade ago. It is to be applauded that, despite the tensions built up between the educational administration and the teaching community in recent months, both parties have had the ability to make amends in time. A scenario without a collective conflict in progress will be essential when so many other difficulties and doubts that were also behind the accumulated discomfort are still standing, and resolving them will largely require a good dose of effort and good will.
To get started, advance start of the course. A measure that, despite the interference it produces in the routines and work rhythms of the centers, adapts the school calendar much better to the vacation and work rhythm of families. The problem should not be such if the change of calendar, with hardly any time between the teachers’ return from vacation and the start of classes, had occurred in conditions that would have made it possible to have the definitive templates for the following course, the approved curricula and the necessary training carried out before the holidays. And this has not been the case. The course will start after the teachers have had little more time than necessary to put the furniture and school supplies in order, an element of tension that should be avoidable. The fact that much of the resumes that, after the entry into force of the new general educational law, there are still drafts to be approved and without adapted pedagogical materials, it will undoubtedly be surpassed by the professionalism of the teaching staff. Although, again, adds one more element of unnecessary disorganization.
Two other problems should be on the table. Both of them. The difficulties for the VT offer to adjust easily and within the appropriate timeframes to the existing demand (Educació recognizes that the system must be reviewed to avoid that, after having created 158 new intermediate level groups at this point, 20,000 students without a place in some centers and studies and 26,000 empty in others) should be the subject of a priority debate. As well as the capacity of the system to serve both vocational training as a continuation of secondary education, which has been given priority this year, and as a second chance for workers or students. But while this situation will surely remain muted, the controversy will surely be greater in the case of the application of regulations and rulings on the use of Spanish at school.
The transversal agreement between the majority of the Catalan parties as an alternative to 25% of classes in Spanish dictated by the judges should allow the controversy to be settled. But although it would be illusory to expect this to happen when the language appears as a sweet element of confrontation from various political positions, perhaps it would be somewhat easier if the pact were publicly defended for what it is, and not as a victory against the threat of the presence of Spanish at school. I mean, like an agreement so that Catalan and Spanish, without quotas, have the presence that with pedagogical criteria is advisable, center to center, to guarantee the objective of sufficient mastery of Catalan and Spanish by all schoolchildren. Making one or another language a foreign, hostile or expendable body is not part of what was signed. Not even what coexistence in Catalonia needs.