What weapon does the school have against hate?
We live in strange times: hatred has become a national pastime. It doesn't take much to ignite it: three headlines, two talk shows, and a couple of tweets, and suddenly half the country is judging the other half from the comfort of their sofas, with pre-packaged opinions. Curiously, in this race to point fingers, schools are always mentioned. As if the social fracture were the fault of a poorly corrected dictation or a badly presented media project.
The irony is bitter: school is the only place where hatred doesn't enter alone; it enters as a disoriented child, carrying a backpack not heavy with books, but with stories no one wants to hear. And it's welcomed, without papers or suspicion, because public schools don't discriminate, they educate. That's why I firmly believe in the need to be clear: the debate about hatred takes place on television sets, the solution is found in classrooms.
Those who speak of hate as if it were an abstraction have never seen a six-year-old defend a classmate who speaks another language. They've never seen a group of fourth-grade students form a circle so a new girl doesn't feel alone. They've never witnessed the daily miracle of teachers who, instead of building walls, build bridges. This, and not empty rhetoric, is what builds true coexistence. But of course, this doesn't sell. Hate does.
When I see certain speeches, delivered with more testosterone than facts, I'm reminded that in many schools we have children from more than twenty countries. Some arrive speaking languages we can't pronounce and with life stories no adult would wish upon them. And yet, in the classroom, all of this stops. The narrative of hatred is interrupted, and something more revolutionary begins: learned coexistence. It's not naiveté; it's politics with a capital P.
Because while some talk about "locals first" and "saving the country," we educate in a different direction: people first, dignity first, the future we must share first. Hate speech always has the same structure: simplify, blame, divide. Schools do the exact opposite: grow, understand, unite. It's no coincidence that those who shout the loudest against schools are the ones who attend them the least.
Catalan in school
When a child learns to read the world in Catalan—yes, in Catalan, our language and our shared home—they are also learning to find their place within a collective "we" that excludes no one. At the Jacint Verdaguer school, for example, Catalan is not a barrier: it is the keystone that allows everyone to enter. A school without a language is a school without a backbone; a school with a shared language is a community that recognizes itself.
And let me be clear: a high-skills or highly complex school is the best anti-hate laboratory there is. Here you see how true tolerance is built, the kind that can't be learned in a tweet or a lecture hall speech. Every day, without cameras or applause, children who would never have met learn to be classmates. And in that humble gesture, there's more national policy than in a thousand press conferences. That's why it bothers me, and at the same time inspires me, to see that there are adults who prefer easy hate to hard work.
Educating is complicated. Hating is cheap. But at school, we choose to make life more difficult for ourselves. Not out of heroism, but out of decency. Verdaguer is an example, but not an exception. Schools in that country do far more for cohesion than any political marketing strategy. We have children who arrive fearful and leave feeling a sense of belonging. We have families who discover that diversity is not a threat but an opportunity. We have staff who, despite their exhaustion, believe that each day can be better than the last.
What weapon does the school have against hatred? Not factions, not speeches, not insults. Just three old-fashioned tools: language, culture, and humanity. And, surprisingly, they work better than all the engineering of resentment. I've learned that hatred always makes a lot of noise. And that the school, on the other hand, works in silence. But it's a silence that transforms. When we open the door of our school each morning, it's not just students who enter: it's the society we will be in twenty years' time, with its tensions, its aspirations, and its vulnerabilities. And I think that, if hatred has a limit, it's right there. In a primary school classroom with poorly stacked boards, half-fallen poster boards, and a future that doesn't yet know how to speak, but that, when it does, won't shout at anyone. Because it will have learned, above all, to look at the other and recognize itself in them.
And that, whatever some self-proclaimed enlightened ones may say, can only be taught by a school that truly lives and breathes.