The botched education system and political disaffection

The Department of Education has reacted swiftly to the chaos it itself generated with the monumental error in allocating places for the next academic year. An error that has forced the process to start all over again: the rectification has been made in record time. Very well. But this is the only good news in the mess we've witnessed these past few days.

The episode leaves a feeling of bad taste and unease. It's unacceptable for an administration to be so unreliable. The more than apparent lack of internal controls and discretion in key decisions like the one at hand generates a lot of uncertainty. What's really going on inside this department? Negligence, quarrels, revenge? How is it possible that the botched job in question happened? A person in charge has been dismissed, all right. But is there something else behind it? Is he a scapegoat? Can a single person organize a mess like this? There are still quite a few unknowns to be clarified. And we need to dig deeper. Not so much to find culprits, but to reverse the poor institutional press of the department headed by Esther Niubó.

Citizens in general, and those affected by this case in particular, are understandably left with a taste of mistrust. If something like this, affecting thousands of people, could have happened, what guarantees do I have that I, a private citizen, will be treated well in my dealings with the administration? If this huge blunder has occurred with teacher positions, what could happen with the allocation of schools for students?

Disaffection with politics and public service is one of the problems facing democratic regimes. If one doesn't have confidence, why should one pay taxes? Why should one vote? The discourses of the far right feed on this growing distrust. Not only is there the obvious discredit caused by corruption, of which we are also seeing scandalous doses at the heart of the State these days with the Montoro case. Situations like the one that occurred in Education also fuel ultra-extremism and neoliberal discourses that attack anything that smacks of the public sector. Giving prestige to the public service is a major unfinished business with historical roots that have not been fully overcome: "Come back tomorrow"Nineteenth-century popularized by Mariano José de Larra.

Precisely, one of the flagship projects of Salvador Illa's government is the reform of the administration, to make it more professional, more transparent, and efficient, and also to depoliticize it by ending the finger-pointing and mass replacement of middle managers whenever there is continuity to technical teams based on electoral circumstances. Too deeply rooted, it will only get worse.