Something uncomfortable happened to Sweden: for years it lived off the prestige of an educational system that was no longer achieving the same results. PISA 2012 made a problem difficult to ignore: 478 points in mathematics, 483 in reading, and 485 in science. But six years later they were 502, 506, and 499. The average explains only part of the story. In mathematics, between 2012 and 2018, the percentage of students below the basic level fell by 8.3 percentage points, and those reaching the highest levels grew by 4.6. TIMSS pointed in the same direction: Swedish 8th-grade students went from 484 points in 2011 to 501 in 2015.

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.

High-complexity schools are today the vanguard of our education system. Where dozens of languages, histories, and expectations coexist, the harshest social inequalities and the most transformative opportunities are also concentrated. In these contexts, the Catalan language plays a decisive role: it can become the passport that opens the door to equal opportunities or, if not worked on intensively and rigorously, it can become another factor of inequality.