The Government's pilot plan to introduce plainclothes police officers in educational centers to ensure coexistence already had its first collateral damage. As in the most heated years of the Procés, Susanna Griso's program returned to the doors of a high school in Catalonia to assess the experiment. The high school that had the honor of receiving such a fortunate visit was Eugeni d'Ors in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat. The reporter interviewed Àlex, a student wearing a t-shirt with the legend "Out with the occupying forces from the Catalan Countries". The student described this initiative as a “racist and stigmatizing attack on the center”. He explained, in a good tone and with politeness, the complexity of the high school, with a majority of students of immigrant origin, and the social vulnerability problems of the families. The boy demanded more mediators, psychologists, and educational staff instead of police officers. He regretted that the officers are not perceived as positive figures by the students, because they often stop them on the metro or are part of eviction operations in the neighborhood.Immediately, Toni Cantó, a regular panelist, jumped in, praising the police's role as figures of protection and conciliation. Together with the presenter, they defended the dissuasive and mediation role they could exercise. Meanwhile, Àlex stood waiting, listening to the rest of the adults on television contradict him. Mariló Montero, who was part of the panel, intervened disdainfully, as if scolding the boy: “I'm seeing an attack by this kid on the Mossos!”, she warned with concern. Meanwhile, Àlex waited in silence. A teacher from Eugeni d’Ors who contacted the newsroom of ARA reported that the student, who voluntarily accepted the request to attend Antena 3, waited during recess to make the connection. In principle, he was only supposed to intervene to explain his point of view. But when they started interviewing him, classes had already begun again, and he had to enter the classroom late. This detail did not worry Espejo público so much. Griso gave way to Toni Castejón, spokesperson for a Mossos union, who, with a cocky attitude, replied to the boy: “I've been amazed by the kid's testimony. He's called us racists twice. I don't know if he's a minor, but I'm not going to answer him”. This police officer's testimony was priceless. It should be submitted to the Department of Education as proof of the pilot plan. “I'm going to give you a lesson: the Mossos don't evict”, the police spokesperson reminded him with a tense and defensive attitude. Luckily, the police have to provide a mediation service and show a gentle touch with the students in the centers. If they are high schools with high conflictivity problems, these characters are just what's needed to foster a good atmosphere and show off this skill when dealing with adolescents. 

I admit that when I first heard the rumor that someone wanted to introduce plainclothes police officers into classrooms, I immediately thought it was some bizarre far-right proposal. One of those that offer easy remedies to complicated problems and that inevitably become false solutions. Those so tempting and noisy ones, which last as long as a lollipop in the playground, but which in reality are gaining ground and making a national priority. I suppose that's what I wanted – what I needed – to believe. But no. With a lump in my throat, it turns out to be a governmental proposal with official backing that supposedly started Monday in thirteen educational centers. Plainclothes police officers inside our schools with a supposed preventive character: that's where we are. The unease is preventively infinite – like a solemn failure, like an undeniable defeat, like a complete renunciation–. The mere imagined image of a plainclothes officer rummaging through students' lives completely unsettles, destroys the foundations of democratic schooling, and recreates a degrading imaginary of an education subjected to police criteria of safety, surveillance, and control. Looked at from any angle, a sacrilegious absurdity. These are not times for naivety, but one believed, after a resounding general strike by teachers, as democratic as it was historical, that the response would be different, in line with the accumulated demands of the sector and following the broad social support shown in the streets by teachers from all over the country. Fewer class sizes; more pedagogical resources; better conditions; more counselors and more professionals in all areas – from integration assistants to intercultural mediators, from support staff to psychopedagogues, from speech therapists to psychologists–. Nowhere was any police presence requested – and if you pass by any public school you will see a thousand protest banners of all colors, but not a single one demanding police presence–. What is still demanded is more time dedicated to each student in training, to each life under construction, through greater community, social, and neighborhood involvement, and socially addressing the enormous difficulties in centers of high complexity. Resolving in a completely opposite direction and choosing to put police first to explain to young people how adult life works out there is, simultaneously, infantilizing adults and adulterating children. And it is discrediting the teacher, to whom we entrust the education of our daughters and sons, by exchanging moral authority for disciplinary authority. And it is also stigmatizing, center by center, social inequalities where poverty and social segregation hit hardest. And it is banishing inwards, when the war rumbles so loudly outside, the indispensable promotion of a culture of peace, disregarding the immense efforts and enormous accumulated experience in mediation, management, and transformative resolution of all conflict.At this impossible crossroads is when we must ask ourselves how on earth we have arrived here –and why and why now– and try to find out if it is all a weather balloon, a smokescreen, or a ceremony of confusion. And we don't know –it still escapes us–. It is known –form and substance– how it has been promoted: with opaque stealth and without any debate with the educational community. And we also know how we have known it: through journalistic information. Two more reasons to immediately suspend –radical defect in form– the application of the pilot plan. Unfortunately, this way of doing things fits too well with how the wet paper agreement has been signed with two majority unions that in education have been left in absolute minority and have received, in a democratic consultation, the unanimous rejection of general amendment from those they claim to represent.

The public systems we have in operation were designed for reasonably predictable societies. Schools, healthcare, employment services, social policies: all of it was built on the premise that there was a majority who had stable links in the family, neighborhood, and workplace, and who followed more or less standard itineraries. And that, on the other hand, there was also a minority who deviated and needed exceptional attention. This premise blew up a long time ago. What was once episodic, such as precariousness, diversity of origins, non-linear life paths, young people's disengagement from institutions, has become increasingly structural. And public systems, designed to manage homogeneity, are increasingly overwhelmed by a reality that does not fit into the expected boxes.

“In teaching, it has become fashionable to adopt new and fanciful ideas, and many young teachers are carried away by the mistaken notion that unless a method is new, it cannot be the best. However, it is well to remember that change does not necessarily imply progress. Every method must be subjected, first, to the laws of common sense applied to the development of the child’s mind, and, second, to the test of actual classroom experience, before it can be considered the best method, or even a good method”. This paragraph is extracted from page 105 of a book published in New York in 1885 and titled The Eclectic Manual of Methods for the Assistance of Teachers. Any sensible person knows that the new and the good are different categories and that they can coincide or diverge. But in education, as the American pedagogue Robert Pondiscio recently said, “stability is easily confused with complacency or indifference. Therefore, schools reward the appearance of change over real improvement.” These words may seem exaggerated, but if I review my teaching experience since the early 70s, what I see is a kind of St. Vitus' dance of novelties that present themselves with a lot of promises under their arm, but which expire in four or five years. The usual thing is that the change has not been approved for being the technical answer to a problem, but because it allows us to show ourselves full of comforting vitality.And what if to improve Catalan schools the first thing we need is to cure our addiction to miracle solutions?According to Pondiscio, the reasons that explain the vulnerability of schools to phosphorescent ideas are four: The first is the weakness of our evaluation and feedback systems, which hinders an objective view of our results. There are so many variables at play in an educational center that it is very difficult to identify the specific responsibility of each one in the running of the center. The cause-and-effect relationship is never entirely clear, and where we discover correlations that align with our ideology, we tend to see causation.

Teacher unrest in Catalonia is no longer an arguable perception, but a sustained reality. It has long been expressed in assemblies, in corridors, and lately, in the streets. The demands are known: salary improvements, reduced class sizes, more resources, less bureaucracy. These are legitimate and necessary demands. But perhaps they are not enough. We are moving in the superficial waters of a very deep issue that we have not yet faced with enough determination: what does it mean to be a teacher today and how is this profession recognized over time?In the context of the State, and also in Catalonia, the teaching career continues to be more administrative than professional. The current system is essentially based on the accumulation of seniority and complements such as sexennials. Today, teachers can accumulate five sexennials throughout their careers, and there are already voices calling for a sixth to adapt to longer careers. But this logic, based on adding periods, can hardly be considered a full professional career. And it reflects neither the complexity nor the evolution of the teaching profession. More than an incentive to develop teaching competencies, sexennials have become a survival mechanism within the system: a long-distance race where the prize is, above all, persistence, and not the recognition of quality or professional leadership.This is, probably, one of the deepest roots of the malaise that is experienced. Because when there is no real recognition, motivation can shift to other areas: salary, conditions, workload. All of this is important, but it does not replace what gives meaning to a profession: the possibility of progressing, of being recognized, of contributing to the profession in a different way as knowledge and experience accumulate.Professor Qing Gu conducts research at the Institute of Education at the University College London on teacher well-being. She concludes that this is closely linked to opportunities for professional development throughout their careers, beyond strict material conditions. In other words, what sustains teachers is not just what they receive, but what they can become within the profession. What they can contribute.From a European and international perspective, it is very surprising —very much so— that the public debate in Catalonia continues to be focused almost exclusively on quantitative variables and salary incentives, while the construction of a true teaching career takes a back seat. A career that defines stages, roles, and responsibilities, that recognizes that not all teachers make the same contribution, and that this is not a problem but an opportunity. 

We always make literature: when we order a coffee, we recount our ailments to a doctor, we write an email, we insult (by the way: the low quality of insults nowadays is striking), we make the shopping list, we offer condolences, we declare our eternal or circumstantial love, we scold our child or argue with our partner.Those who wrote electoral messages on the walls in Pompeii ("Vote X") were making literature; those who hastily and eagerly wrote crude poems ("We have peed in bed; truly / we are a disaster. / Do you want the reasons, innkeeper? There was no / chamber pot!"); the romantics ("How I would like to hold your dear arms around my neck and kiss your lips") and the pragmatic merchants of their own bodies ("Hope, yes to everything, nine aces"). Those who confessed their existential concerns ("Once dead, we are nothing") and the composers of meta-graffiti ("It surprises me, oh wall, that you have not yet collapsed under the weight of the foolishness of so many writers").We find literature on the walls of Bilbao ("Violent gays seek revenge. Gay Intifada") or Cordoba ("Hating is for weaklings") or on the Roman wall of Lugo ("Romani ite domum", that is to say, "Romans go home").These graffiti or, if you prefer, these murals are a literary exercise (although not very civic), because they aim to shape an idea to give it the form of an aphorism.It seems that the first graphic representation of Jesus Christ was a graffiti from 200 AD found in the Pedagogium of the Palatine Hill in Rome. With the intention of ridiculing Christianity, it shows Jesus with a huge donkey's head and nailed to the cross. One inscription says: “Alexamenos worships God”. Not far away, in the same building, another inscription says: "Alexamenos is faithful". Perhaps this person is literarily claiming their faith in front of those who have mocked them?When we meet a friend and they ask us how we are doing, we immediately set about artistically modeling our memory to give it the shape of a narrative. In speaking – forgive the expression – we literary. Don't we perhaps spend the day explaining (supposedly) interesting things about ourselves? And isn't a biography the result of our insistence on imposing narratives on the chaos of our existence?Then, and here is where I wanted to get, the understanding we have of ourselves cannot be more accurate than the rigor of the words we use to understand ourselves. Beyond words, there is only darkness and, perhaps, sentimental jam. In the case – highly improbable – that there were a genuine self, a true self, without words it would be mute.

Last Wednesday, Joan Coscubiela published in ARA the article “Teacher Malaise and Unionism”. An alternative title could have been “70,000 strikers are wrong; I am right!”, but the paternalism would be too obvious.Questioning the 50,000 education workers who have signed the manifesto Let's Dignify or the 40,000 teachers who have voted against the agreement between CCOO, UGT, and the Government is a rather pathetic role. That is why the author chose to attack USTEC. Not their specific actions in the current conflict, but the model of “malestar unionism” – opposed to a supposed “responsible” unionism – and its “tone”. With this, he tried to shift the conflict to the ground of moral delegitimization in order not to address either the content of the agreement – manifestly insufficient – or the gestation of its signing, outside the legitimate space of negotiation, in which CCOO and UGT do not reach 25% of the representation. Coscubiela speaks with an argumentation in hand. Therefore, the best response is to go to the things themselves.Without conflict, there is nothing to agree on. Fortunately, the usual strategy of concertation unionism of picking fruits sown by others when they are still green and presenting them as their own victories has ended in bankruptcy. What caused the formula to fail this time? Two years of organization in which the campaign Let's Dignify the Profession has contributed significantly. How did we approach it?Defining demands collectively. To politicize malaise, diagnosis is first needed. Therefore, we conducted the study of educational malaise with 12,000 surveys followed by 6,000 interviews to determine the real demands of educational staff and incorporate them into the manifesto: recover purchasing power, reduce ratios, create resources for inclusive education, and eliminate bureaucracy.Achieving the majority. We collected 50,000 signatures to build legitimacy for transversal and clear demands, promoting assemblies in each center and mapping grassroots organization. Also planning: nine months in advance, the massive educational strike of February 11 was on the calendar within a structured plan, with tests of strength like the massive demonstration on November 15.Negotiating until the end. For six months and over thirty hours, we have not left the table and have led the negotiation, contributing a large part of the measures included in the agreement. And we have done so with transparency, broadcasting the meetings live to the Dignifiquemos Forum, which has over 4,000 followers.This has been our task until the department has given up convincing and has abruptly cut off dialogue to close the agreement with the leadership of CCOO and UGT in a political operation to save the Government and pressure for budget approval. A crude demobilization maneuver on the eve of the March strikes.At the March 9 meeting, everything was already cooked: news about the signing of the agreement published while we were still “negotiating”, videos selling its virtues within a minute, signing ceremony at Palau in the afternoon. Amateur theater. That is why it is especially cynical to claim that there are unions that “never sign”, when CCOO's tactic involves delaying so that signing cannot happen at the optimal point. Otherwise, victories would be collective and could not be sold as “useful unionism”.

Nick Gibb, the English politician who has reflected most on education, has written one of the most pedagogically stimulating books of this century so far. Reforming lessonsThe book, which bears the subtitle "Why English schools have improved since 2010 and how it was achieved," was published by Gibb. Gibb served as Shadow Education Minister in 2005 and as Education Minister from 2010 to 2012, from 2014 to September 2021, and again from October 2022 to November 2023.