The effort that Illa must make if he really wants young people to know him

A video from Flaixbac is circulating on social media in which a group of teenagers are unable to name the current president of the Generalitat. When prompted with the name Salvador, one responds Espriu and another Dalí. One says Pedro Sánchez, but it's not an ironic comment about who really governs this corner of the world, but pure institutional ignorance. The program doesn't reveal if this collection of cheerfully disoriented witnesses represented 10% of the young people they approached at the entrance to the Education Fair or 90%. Other videos show the same level of success in naming the architect of the Sagrada Família or the mountain range that separates Catalonia from France.

Salvador Illa wanted to play along and made a video on social media in response, saying that young people are interested in politics because they are interested in housing, their future prospects, or mobility. He also says that they will make an effort so that they know who the president of the Generalitat is "and, above all, so that they know what the Generalitat does." The other effort that must be made, of course, is to improve education so that students leave compulsory education with a minimum of political culture. Surely there is clickbait in these videos of startled youngsters – the English talk about rage bait when interaction is sought through indignation – but in any case, the videos highlight the need to increase resources for education and, above all, to establish media literacy in classrooms once and for all. Disconnecting them from current events is disconnecting them in general. That is to say, making them more insular and, therefore, susceptible to responding to the primary and divisive impulses of political populism. And, in turn, making them also more vulnerable to the corrosive effect of increasingly less social networks.