Illa's government also stumbles with education. And behind it, the whole country stumbles.
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The socialist Government of Salvador Illa is ostentatiously stumbling over education. It is not new. The republican government of Aragonès, with counselor González-Cambray at the head of the department, also stumbled over it. But in reality, and this is the most serious thing, it is the whole country, the whole society, the future of our country, that is stumbling over education.Let's go step by step. Look at this page: Salvador Illa assumes the challenge of teachers. The president defends the agreement with CCOO and UGT and without USTEC. We have a labor dispute with the teachers that in the month and a half remaining of the course will provide us with 17 days of various strikes, about five per school center. So we have a Government that is playing hardball (negotiating stance) but which has made the mistake of overestimating the importance of a pact with unions that, in education, are not the majority. This, at a time when almost half of the aspiring teachers have failed the aptitude test. Only 54% of students have passed the exams to be able to take the selectivity exam and access education degrees. The good part is that we have tests that filter the most capable students. The bad part is that such generally low grades say something worrying about how competent students arrive at our universities.While we are still pondering this news, we turn the page and find that the industry warns that with the current training they cannot fill 15,000 positions a year. In other words, we have jobs, but we don't have prepared people. And Catalan industry has been like this for decades. Well, it is in the midst of all this that the Government wants to incorporate Mossos into schools, in plain clothes, to help teachers with security and mediation tasks. The debate in Parliament yesterday went like this: Salvador Illa: I accept that you don't see what this is about, I accept it. If I had seen what this is about, as president, I would say let's go ahead and do it throughout Catalonia. We are saying "let's do a proof of concept". This is what we are saying. And if the centers don't want to do it, it won't be done. What fear do they have of trying it?Mònica Sales : In schools, authority is needed, yes. That of the teachers, not that of the police. They already do a good job where it matters.Jéssica Albiach: These centers do not need police officers. What they need are psychologists, social educators, integrators, to lower the ratios, for the coordinators of coexistence and well-being to have exclusive dedication and specific training, and for the Plan against Child Poverty to work. That is what they need.Pilar Castillejo : You are assuming a mental framework and a way of doing things that is not characteristic of public school, but rather of the far right.Amidst a conflict with teachers, amidst very unpromising results from aspiring teachers or students in PISA tests, and from batches of graduates facing the labor needs of the industry, the Government opens the can of worms of having Mossos in schools and finds, of course, that teachers are asking for more specialists, not security personnel, no matter how much mediation they know how to do (which the Mossos do) and that it is done in other countries. It has been decades that something is not going well in the education of this country, which has to do with growing social complexity, the social valuation of the work of teachers, the constant changes in educational laws, the economic and material resources available, the unionization of their demands, the difficulty for dialogue in a world that feels unfairly criticized and is very susceptible to any external force. Finding trust and consensus to improve education is a matter of life or death for the country.Good morning.