If peace education has roots and a long history anywhere, it's in Catalonia. Historically, education professionals have been one of the most committed groups to international cooperation, both as field workers and in our country. Evidence of this is the work carried out in schools during the conflicts in Bosnia and Iraq, which connects with the work currently being done in Palestine.
For decades, global justice education organizations have supported educational centers in addressing international conflicts and global inequalities. The result of so much effort is that today this task, which we call global education, is perfectly captured in Vector 6 of the official curriculum: with learning situations to foster democratic citizenship and critical awareness. Where does the questioning of this work come from, precisely at this moment, and to what or to whom does it respond?
We know that the Catalan education system is facing a difficult time, after a decade of sustained decline in academic results, with 35% of children at risk of poverty or social exclusion and one in three children with special educational needs. Added to this reality are the DANA (National Action Plan), the fires, the terrorist attacks, the refugees from Ukraine, and the genocide in Palestine. The demand for educational materials to address the multiple crises we face is increasingly frequent.
The world enters the classroom in a thousand different ways, and failing to take this into account is precisely what generates tension, because the crisis of educational systems is also global. The question is not whether it is necessary to talk about Palestine, but how the educational system and the educational community assume and incorporate the purpose of welcoming so much reality and helping to understand it, if possible guided by a sense of justice and the defense of human rights everywhere.
Talking about Palestine in schools is obligatory and as political as not doing so. In June in Berlin, at the international conference ofAcademic Network on Global Education and Learning We shared this need to go beyond the transmission of knowledge and to help new generations develop the skills to understand, act, and transform a complex world. Without neglecting strong mathematics and literacy skills, Veronica Boix-Mansilla spoke of fostering perspective thinking: the ability to understand diverse worldviews, foster empathy and emotional education, and generate contexts in which it is possible to imagine different futures. At this historical moment, with a genocide broadcast live, everything seems to indicate that a wave of reaction is creeping into the educational community. The educational system needs to recover and strengthen its ethical and political dimension, not only because it is necessary, but because it is urgent to reorient the course of this world that we will leave to future generations.
