These days, schools reopen their doorss. Inflation has once again become the center of the conversation about going back to school because the impact of the rise in prices on books, school supplies and canteens has been even more noticeable than the previous year. Inflation in education, as in so many other areas as we have pointed out, accentuates inequalities when one of the bases of the European social model is precisely the school as a guarantor of equal opportunities. Inflation causes more to be less. Governments invest more, families spend more, but this does not necessarily result in more resources for education, on many occasions it is the opposite. Inflation, then, is the subject of going back to school. But the school has many challenges and it is our purpose to understand them.
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The demographic curve goes down. In Catalonia, for example, this year 20,000 fewer students enter the education system. Effect of the three years of the confinement that plummeted the birth rate. But the trend will continue. It is an opportunity if you know how to take advantage of it. The context of the coming years does not encourage increased investment in education, but maintaining it -discounting inflation- would allow us to catch up with the rest of Europe without budgetary tensions.
Assured financial means, The school -like so many other institutions- has the challenge of defining the meaning of its activity in the digital age. Teachers complain, and rightly so, that society is sending them mixed messages. Any social problem, from traffic deaths to anorexia, calls for the intervention of the school. But then, parents and politicians treat it as a simple warehouse for minors. This irresponsibility of society cannot lead to leaving the future of the school in the hands of teachers alone. We strongly hear the union vision of the school. must be heard, but It is not only teachers who can speak about the school, and even less only the teachers’ unions. More teachers are needed, but above all what is needed is define the task that society makes to the school, what we now rhetorically call the mission. And here the debates become more complex. As the director of a school in Barcelona told us recently in an article, eliminating technology from the classroom is not the way to go, no matter how much some media ayatollahs insist on it. But to face this challenge, and many others, teachers need to be told what kind of authority we grant them, it will not be that of repression, but it cannot be that of a systematic questioning by parents and politicians of what they are told, and even more than what is required of them, to the students. Without some form of authority, the most democratic possible, education is unfeasible because of the many teachers that are hired and because of the many fatwas against the motive that are published in the BOE. And what we say about technology is equally valid for the level of demand or for the excesses of memorization as an evaluation criterion. At EL PERIÓDICO we want to help society understand what is happening at school and to do so, together with unions and politicians, we want to give a voice to fathers and mothers, to the students themselves and to experts.