Glass citizens
"The day will come when tolerance will be so intense that the intelligent will be forbidden to think so as not to disturb the imbeciles". Fyodor Dostoyevsky's sentence has been fulfilled a century later. That day has come. The LOMLOE (Organic Law for the Modification of the Organic Law on Education) better known as Celáa-Alegría has consecrated laziness as the supreme value of Public Education. Almost half a century after the arrival of democracy, the majority parties have been unable to reach a State Pact for Public Education. The result: the highest school failure rate in the PISA territory: 33%.
Of the 8 organic laws on Education enacted during the Transition, 3 have been drafted by the centre right (LOECE, 1980, (Organic Law on Education and Schools, A. Suárez), LOCE, 2002 (Organic Law on the Quality of Education, Esperanza Aguirre) and (LOMCE, 2013 (Law for the Improvement of the Quality of Education, Wert). And five by left-wing governments. The PSOE has signed the LODE, 1985 (Organic Law Regulating the Right to Education), the LOGSE, 1990 (Organic Law on the General Organisation of the Education System), the LOPEG (Organic Law on Participation, Evaluation and Governance of Educational Institutions), the LOE, 2006 (Organic Law on Education) and the LOMLOE, 2020 (Organic Law for the Modification of the Organic Law on Education).
The LGE, 1970, ( General Education Law, -Franquista-) established compulsory education up to the age of 14; the UCD regulation can be considered as transitional and introduced democratisation in schools and regulated parents' associations. All three of Felipe González's regulations have been controversial. While the LODE maintained the structure of EGB and BUP, the LOGSE meant the end of General Basic Education, introduced BUP, created school councils and set up the system of concerts for private education; the LOGSE put an end to EGB and the beginning of ESO (Compulsory Secondary Education) up to the age of 16. BUP and COU were replaced by two years of Bachillerato, the ratio was lowered from 40 to 25 students per class and the subject of Religion became optional, but did not count towards the academic record. The LOPEG obliged state-subsidised schools to admit pupils from social minorities.
J.M. Aznar's LOCE was barely in force for a year. Its novelty was relevant: it decreed bilingualism (English) after more than 100 years of French in our classrooms as a Foreign Language. J.L. Rodríguez Zapatero with the LOE fulminated the popular initiative by eliminating the most controversial aspects: goodbye to the itineraries of ESO and Bachillerato (Reválida), he created Education for Citizenship and admitted that it was possible to pass the course with two failed grades. Although it established approximately 65% of common subjects throughout the national territory, the nationalist and language-speaking Autonomous Regions opened a war for linguistic immersion that has resulted in permanent disobedience to the State and the Courts of Justice, even going so far as to persecute Spanish-speaking pupils at recess, to denounce teachers who teach in Spanish and to force Ukrainian refugee children to speak Catalan or Basque against the criteria of their parents.
M. Rajoy's law took another turn of the screw and eliminated the subject of Education for Citizenship and Selectivity, replacing it with Re-assessments that did not have time to be implemented. The LOMLOE of the ambassador to the Vatican, Isabel Celaá - "children do not belong to their parents, they belong to the State" - has introduced general passes so as not to traumatise children and the elderly, the unlimited failure rate to pass the course, the neutralisation of teachers by taking away their authority in the classroom, the empowerment of the APAs and the left-wing unions, all to put an end to the culture of effort. Objective: to artificially reduce school failure with a view to the next elections. This is legislating with ideology. And with sectarianism.
The latest decree developing the Celaá-Alegría Law deliberately forgets the rule of three, Roman numerals, prefixes, suffixes, verb conjugations and dictations. What is important is gender identity, the empowerment of students as agents of eco-social change and sex. At the stroke of a BOE, the social-communist government (PSOE-Podemos) has erased Philosophy and History from the curriculum. Philosophy is the knowledge that stimulates reasoning and therefore generates doubt and thus freedom of thought. Without logic one cannot live.
Education - or rather teaching - is the social lift that allows the poorest to gain access to a hard-earned prosperity through hard work. Philosophy, with 2,500 years of history, has made it possible since classical Greece to analyse two key concepts in the development of humanity: time and space. Without them there is no history, no literature, no mathematics, no geography. History will no longer be explained chronologically. No, in ESO the History of Spain will be studied from 1812 onwards. Goodbye to our Atapuerca ancestors, to our Phoenician, Greek and Roman past; the Reconquest did not exist, nor did the Catholic Monarchs, nor the Discovery of America, nor the round-the-world voyage of Magellan and Elcano, nor our War of Independence against Napoleon Bonaparte. Let's see if today's high school graduates' brains are going to explode. The aim of these social engineers, direct heirs of Maravall, Marchessi and Rubalcaba, is simple: to erase history, to erase Spain.
They say that the Second Republic will be studied - it's about time! -which, by the way, led us straight into the Civil War. Surely now they will win it with Franco in El Pardo, but they will omit the 800 murders of ETA during half a century, crimes against humanity according to the European Parliament that Dr. Sánchez whitewashes as government partners to remain in La Moncloa. Is there anything more electorally manageable than a young man trapped in his ignorance? They are worse than slaves. "They have the soul of slaves", as we learnt from Marcelino Camacho. Hence the temptation to lower the voting age to 18. They will be full citizens to go to the polls, but not to have the Penal Code applied to them. Being young with the PSOE is a bargain.
To top it all off and destroy education until the middle of the century, this government, with the LOMLOE as a weapon loaded with illiteracy, has decided to abolish numerical qualifications. To kill with a stroke of a pen the illusion of feeling satisfied with a good mark. It doesn't matter whether you pass or fail because you pass the same course. The Principle of Equal Opportunities (PIO) has been buried. Now scholarships are given with failing grades. Inadmissible with the PIO that allowed many young people from the rural world to access the Baccalaureate through the Religious Schools - in my case the Trinitarian Fathers of Alcázar de San Juan - and later to access the University, also with scholarships. As President Suárez explained to us, everyone is equal at the start of the opportunities so that later on, effort and talent will put you in the place you deserve in society.
This is no longer the case: LOMLOE makes students (and parents) believe that nobody is left behind. Are they going to implement this system in universities and language schools? Are they going to force Oxford or Cambridge Universities to issue English diplomas at the highest level? All this explains why there is no Spanish University among the top 100 in the world, why we are the country that invests the least in R+D+i and the first in school failure in the OECD. The glorious labour universities (Gijón, Béjar, Córdoba and Alcalá de Henares) have provided thousands of middle managers to Spanish companies since the 1960s. Today, vocational training is rusty because young people have been led to believe that it is possible to obtain a university degree without any effort and to live on a shoestring as if life were the television studio of Sálvame or Isla de las Tentaciones (Temptation Island).
To read the LOMLOE and its development through the decrees is to subsume oneself in a phantasmagorical world. It confuses objectives with aims; it muddles criteria, knowledge, competences, skills and abilities. Never have the pedagogues of the Ministry of Education or the ideologues of Ferraz mixed up churras and "meninas" (as Belén Esteban said) better. Here is an essential point of ESO: "To know and value the animals closest to human beings and to adopt modes of behaviour that favour empathy and care for them". It is not surprising that this school regulation cancels or repeals the popular laws. The improvements eliminate the socialist laws. For example, ZP's Education for Citizenship has been abolished and is now called Education in Civic Values without mentioning that it includes the study of the Spanish Constitution, the Statutes of Autonomy or the foundations of Community Legislation. Therefore, students are left without any knowledge of the Transition or our links with the EU or NATO.
At the same time, thousands of interim teachers, most of whom were hired for political reasons, especially in the Basque Country and Catalonia, are to be integrated into the teaching profession without any opposition. Navarre wants to create its own teaching civil servants outside the state corps. And exclusion on the basis of the autonomous language is not included. It is the exclusion of Spanish-speaking citizens from working throughout the national territory. The same is true of health.
Let us return to education. The exit profile of the students at the end of basic education is quite charming. "Develop a critical, empathetic and proactive spirit to detect situations of inequality and exclusion; accept uncertainty as an opportunity, learning to manage anxiety and feel part of a collective project, both locally and globally, developing empathy and generosity". Very profound. Woody Allen explained it to us: "The deepest thing is emptiness".
More than an Organic Law on Education, it is a test bed for a permanent election campaign. With the abolition of the classic numbering of grades from 1 to 10, as happens everywhere in the world because it is the easiest method for students, their parents, tutors and teachers to understand, evaluations will be expressed in the terms "Insufficient (IN)" for negative grades; "Sufficient (SU)", "Good (BI)", "Notable (NT)" or "Outstanding (SB)" for positive grades. The transcript and the academic record are considered almost a state secret.
Exams may be different within the same classroom and the final grade will be determined collegially. This is another way of diluting the responsibility of the teacher who no longer acts as a teacher but as a birthday entertainer or at worst as another activist of Historical Memory. Learning by repeating and memorising (as is done in tennis or in any activity in life) has been dynamited from the public school. And if you don't memorise, what's left in your brain? The LOMLOE is a nonsense. Let's not forget the most serious thing: there is no limit to the number of failures.
The 289 pages of the BOE are an attack on grammar. Words not admitted by the RAE such as ecosocial change, socioemotional mathematics, gender identity or ecofeminism are constantly repeated. Not since we personally heard in the 80s Carmen Romero, MEP and ex-wife of González, say "young and young people" (although the copyrigth is Elena Valenciano's) have we seen such a kick to the language as in recent years. The political-union language of you, citizens, colleagues... has become too small with the meanings of the minister Montero (UP) with boys, girls, children... until reaching the ridiculousness of Pedro Sánchez in Estonia (or Lithuania) when he said: soldiers and soldiers' soldiers... He is the same president who spoke of Cadiz and Almeria as bordering provinces and the same of Soria, "homeland" of Antonio Machado.
An excessive and unintelligible LONLAE. We read on page 41649 (BOE, 30 March 2022, competition 3). "Understand the interconnected and inter- and eco-dependent nature of human activities, through the identification and analysis of relevant eco-social problems, in order to promote habits and attitudes ethically committed to the achievement of sustainable life". Amen. Has the text been written with Artificial Intelligence?
And what have our honourable academics of the Spanish language said about the LOMLOE and linguistic immersion? Nothing. After Rajoy's abandonment of the Academy, the doctor hastened to pay the bills of the illustrious House and to manage its silences. The Royal Academy of History has protested. Carmen Iglesias has been denouncing the educational programmes of all governments for years. Philosophy teachers grumbled a little a few weeks ago, but they have not taken action. And the unions and teachers in education? Only the retired teachers have said Enough! When will there be a general strike? Not before there is a changeover at La Moncloa.
The political response to this important regulation for the whole of Spanish society has only come from four points: Madrid, Castilla-La Mancha, Castilla y León and Murcia... President Isabel Ayuso will use the loophole granted to her by autonomy to re-establish the Philosophy and Chronological History of Spain, one of the most important in the world. She will dismiss the concepts not admitted by the RAE to give light and splendour to our Castilian or Spanish, she will reinstate the subject of Religion, she will maintain the numerical grades and she will not let pass with (too many) failures.
Emiliano García-Page is clear that education is the roof that protects us from unpredictable inclemencies. And he will also take advantage of his capacity for self-government to return to History and Philosophy. Alfonso Fernández Mañueco is not going to let public schools deteriorate any further with this sectarian law that offers all rights and opportunities to students without demanding anything in return. The term "effort" is repeated only seven times. And the president of Murcia, Fernando López Miras, has also decided to recover subjects and competences that this regulation of Celaá-Alegría, two ministers with little competence, ignores. It is a short-sighted law that deserves a consensus it does not enjoy. Another law to repeal if the government changes. And back to square one.
The lack of stability in education disengages the community and teachers from social commitment. Experts underline that this contributes to a deficit of equal opportunities that affects the most disadvantaged sectors (repeaters, school dropouts). Passing grades increases the deficit of social cohesion. Psychologists confirm that bullying - there are cruel children - generates insecurity and is a breeding ground for later violence and binge drinking. The family is crucial to the backbone of education and teaching in a digital world.
Each person is the effort he or she makes between the ages of 15 and 25. And lives and experiences are personal and never non-transferable. Education is freedom. And it influences collective social and economic well-being. No to toxic education, as the philosophy professor and journalist Antonio Robles denounces. "When a society is determined to commit suicide, it entrusts its destiny to adolescence and populism. And it exchanges science for superstition. We are creating a fragile, subsidised, pampered youth. Crystal citizens".
The preamble of the LOMLOE states that "a good education is the greatest wealth and the main resource of a country and its citizens (ciudadanos y ciudadanas)". We subscribe to this. The word "citizens (ciudadanas)" is superfluous. That is called economy of language. Too many words. Believe me, as Vice Yolanda reiterates in every "canutazo", the LOMLOE is a road of no return, a cultural involution.
Antonio REGALADO directs BAHÍA DE ITACA at:
aregaladorodriguez.blogsot.com