In his speech at the Maritime Museum on September 14, President Illa showed himself to be well aware of the distance between the reality of Catalan education and the ideals that have inspired it. But he does not resign himself and tells us: "We must bring Catalan education to excellence". I agree with him.

This September marks ten years since the launch of the Escola Nova 21 program, a three-year alliance that mobilized half a thousand public and charter schools to update the educational system. The anniversary coincides with the concern over the PISA 2025 results and leads us to revisit a fundamental question: how can education better empower children and young people to understand today's world, develop within it, and contribute to transforming it?

I joke with him saying he must have the Parthenon as his profile picture, but it turns out it's no joke. In the one he chose, we can see the temple's facade in the process of reconstruction, which already allows us to refine the metaphor of his passion a bit: recovering Catalonia's connection with the classics. He has translated into Catalan and for young people the Odyssey and Greek Myths.

President Illa has decided to break the monotony, conscious, perhaps, that it was trapping him. His restrained tone was rewarded during the bewilderment of the 'Procés' aftermath and, by making a virtue of calm, he grasped the country's need to lower the tone and take a pause. With this criterion, and with his rejection of shrillness, Illa has been making progress, at a time when the exercise of conjuncturally assuming the framework of the possible seemed to be imposing itself.

The school year has begun in the Valencian Country with a novelty that should put us all on alert. The PP and Vox government of the Valencian Generalitat has approved the reform of the law they call "of fiscal, administrative and financial management, and organization measures," a dull statement behind which lies the anti-democratic measure of implementing a system of surveillance and ideological control—including denunciations—in the public schools and educational centers of the Valencian Country.The Consell presided over by Juan Francisco Pérez Llorca (Mazón's substitute, who nowadays lives splendidly occupying a deputy's seat, enriched by a salary as president of a parliamentary commission that never meets) has legally entrusted the Educational Inspection with a singular task: to "ensure ideological neutrality" within classrooms. That is to say: a strict supervision of teaching activities, curricular materials, and events held in schools, to avoid any form of "indoctrination." The reform also includes the creation of channels or anonymous reporting mailboxes. Just as you read it: parents who consider it appropriate will be able to report directly, and without giving a name or face, those teachers and professors who, according to them, have infringed upon "ideological neutrality," committed "indoctrination," or broken something else that the PP and Vox consider fundamental: "linguistic freedom." That is to say, those who have the pretension of teaching classes, or conducting activities or academic tests, in Catalan. Or in Valencian, as you wish. Let us remember that we are talking about the same government officials who have also produced regulations to exclude Catalan and Balearic writers from language and literature subjects, with the argument—not at all indoctrinating and ideologically neutral—that "they are not Valencian" and that "they do not write in Valencian." It is the mixture of authoritarianism and hatred for culture and public schools that have always constituted the hallmarks of the extreme right. Now, however, turned into law, it aims to turn the public school into a scene of conflicts and fears that give a new dimension to the sad expression “culture war,” in which academic freedom, and with it constitutional freedoms, are revoked. It is a particularly brazen exhibition of the neo-Francoism of the Spanish right (PP and Vox, let us repeat it) and of the democratic involution it represents.Unions and teaching entities in the Valencian Country have already denounced the desire of Pérez Llorca and his Council to intimidate teachers and to impose a covert parental pin or an ideological police force within public classrooms. This Saturday the 12th, a large demonstration is called in Valencia that will kick off a school year expected to be full of mobilizations. But I return to the beginning: this is not a problem "of the Valencians", but rather it affects us all directly. If this is the sample, it is easy to foresee the direction that the educational policy of a Spanish government controlled by Vox and the PP will take.

The proportion of American adolescents who in PISA tests have not even reached the level necessary to understand an invoice has clearly increased over the last decade.

In classrooms, today, there are different challenges, or puzzles. These different challenges and puzzles need different solutions and ways of solving them.

Even though it is also starting to have –needless to say– its deniers, the PISA report continues to be a reliable and reference instrument in the educational field. The dismal results obtained by the Spanish state in the latest edition, clearly below the European average in reading and mathematics, confirm all fears. The unrest of teachers is expressed through strikes and protests on the first day of class: criticizing and devaluing these protests is a temptation that some politicians and commentators fall into, but that is falling into the classic error of killing the messenger. With their mobilizations, teachers and professors come to give the same bad news as the PISA report: the situation of public education is not sustainable and it is necessary to work on it in an extremely urgent and serious way. It is necessary to work on reality and not on words, speeches, or slogans. There is an inversely proportional relationship between the highly delicate nature of the educational system and the flood of voices that feel emboldened to have their say with pretensions of pontificating. Those who best know the classrooms are those who work there day by day, and it is them who must be listened to and followed.The chaos is widespread throughout the Spanish state, and Catalonia is no exception: not even with the deviation caused by a biased sample that has invalidated the tests (something much worse than a simple error, in a Government that has made an alleged good management of public services its banner), the results obtained by Catalonia are not significantly better than in Spain. Catalonia, which has always stood out for being an advanced country in terms of educational quality in relation to its environment, does have reasons to speak, in this case, of decline, of free fall, or of any metaphor for defeat. The Basque Country is not spared either, which was the other nation on the Peninsula that had traditionally stood out in educational matters.The right to education must be respected, says President Salvador Illa. Indeed, only this right has some surnames that cannot be left unsaid: the right to public and quality education must be respected. And in Catalan. The autonomous communities have transferred educational competence, and in many – governed by the PP or by the PP with Vox – a frontal offensive against public education is observed at all levels, from primary school to university. In the Valencian Community and the Balearic Islands, and also in Aragon, the offensive is also against the Catalan language. The aim is to turn public school into a space of conflict, to scare families and redirect them to charter and private schools. In Catalonia, the political and judicial offensive against those who hate the Catalan school comes from way back, and all kinds of discourses and theories are added that intend to use teachers and students as guinea pigs for all kinds of false debates. Let the teachers teach, let the students learn, and respect the right to strike and the right to public, quality education in Catalan.

Regardless of how we got here, a country that begins the school year with a teachers' strike is a country that has hit rock bottom. Especially if it is a country like Catalonia, where the pedagogical tradition of excellence has been a hallmark of its identity.

We read in ARA that “Catalonia was warned seven times to correct the error in the PISA tests”. Apparently, the National Institute for Educational Evaluation (INEE) informed “Catalonia” that it “had made errors in the sample of students in the tests”. As everyone knows, “23% of the students in the sample were discarded, when the OECD marks that the maximum number of exempted students cannot exceed 5%”. The minister Esther Niubó finds “deficiencies in the communication of criteria to the centers, and has announced the replacement of the Secretary General of Education”.

I am about to return to the school corridors, to meet again with my colleagues, to think systematically (if possible, together) about how to organize a new school year. Having temporarily set aside some of the tensions from the past year, we will need to remind each other that we are professionals in the service of a right: to make it possible for all children and adolescents to access the same educational opportunities. We cannot forget that we are not simply hired hands to do a job; we are teachers in a public service — the school — that guarantees childhoods.

If the reader has young people around them of university age, they have probably heard the same story more than once: people who pass high school and the PAU with good grades and who, despite everything, do not manage to enter the studies they would like. Then they have to settle for studies that were not their preferred ones or, for those who can afford it, opt for a private university.

I am very surprised that in the great school debate we have open in the country, the main actors—with the exception of some particular voices—have ignored the decisive role that families play and that, as a consequence, they have also ignored the very serious behavioral problems in the classrooms of our schools and institutes. It seems that everything revolves around changing the Government's educational policies. But the truth is that some of the main difficulties, here and elsewhere, do not stem from the Government, but are related to parents' expectations and attitudes: their role in educational success or failure and, therefore, in students' attitudes in the classroom.

The Spanish Supreme Court rules “the use of Spanish in the signage of educational centers” supported by public funds cannot be excluded. In the ruling, therefore, an entire section of the document on the organization and management of educational centers (approved by the Department of Education in July 2022) is annulled, which stated that “the signage of the center's spaces is in Catalan, Occitan in Aran, and in Catalan Sign Language if applicable”. It annuls it (and thus shows us that what can be decreed by a government is useless) due to an appeal filed by the Assembly for a Bilingual School, and which the high court has “upheld”. I say “upheld” because that is what is said in legal language, but the polysemy in our language does not bother me.

Although we may not like to admit it, artificial intelligence has practically blown up our educational system in secondary school, high school, and university. The digital world had already impacted us greatly, both in the fact that the use of the internet could –and did– replace the process of searching, learning, and constructing when doing assignments, as well as in attention span and the value of the classroom as a space for training and creation: with virtual classrooms, we had moved to providing them with everything. The world at their fingertips, students believed, and they understood that the era of work and effort was over. Wikipedia, or El Rincón del Vago, became the repositories for the content that appeared in all assignments. Bibliographic resources were no longer needed, and reading even less so. Psychopedagogues, always so attentive to new technologies, considered that there was no problem, that it was a matter of changing methodologies and that, if we knew how to do it, technological resources would work in our favor. They said it was necessary to prioritize the digital skills of young people and not worry about them incorporating knowledge and understanding, but rather skills and competencies. Classrooms became playful spaces where computers and mobile phones were used –learning environments, they called them–, while reading and writing were abandoned, attention span was lost, and the teacher became a mere facilitator. Ignorance and disengagement from learning progressed appropriately, with boys and girls becoming increasingly unmotivated, incapable of effort and work, overprotected, narcissistic, and with neurolearning and mental health problems becoming apparent.For a little over a year now, AI has landed with all the destructive capacity it possesses in the face of the educational system. In assignments, there is not even the work of cutting and pasting. It does it for you directly and completely. It grounds, structures, and writes until it looks like a good job. In general, it is not yet entirely so. It makes intern mistakes: it invents bibliographic references and creates graphs for you, sometimes surreal ones. Since it is a technology that learns, it gets better and better, and with a superficial reading, obvious errors are corrected. And since its formal perfection can raise suspicions about authorship, you can ask it to introduce human errors to make it believable. If, as a professor, you read a product that you know your student did not write with any seriousness, you soon find the mechanical character in the writing, the lack of soul. We have no defense possible against this irruption which does nothing but substitute work, relegating the student who uses this facilitator tool. Again, techno-optimists claim that we must integrate it, help disciples use it, they say, appropriately and responsibly. Also that this is the future and that it "has come to stay." Of this last part, I am sure, but if we bet on technologies and methodologies that replace us – and I'm not talking about jobs, although that too – that eliminate any effort, what is fundamental in learning disappears, which is the process. Without the journey, there is no achievement of knowledge nor the value of experience. It is the annihilation of human knowledge and the loss by individuals of their singularity linked to culture and knowledge; soulless individuals.

While these days we talk about educational strikes, lack of resources and the needs of schools, there is a group that hardly appears in the headlines: the support staff. We are the professionals who accompany children and young people with disabilities, developmental disorders or autonomy difficulties so that they can participate on equal terms in the daily life of schools: in classrooms, playgrounds and dining halls. However, little is said about our working conditions, our training, or the importance of our work for inclusion to be a reality and not just a declaration of intent.

With that gift of opportunity that has always characterized him, Adif has made an offering to the Holy Father of a gift that allows him to grasp the reality of Catalan land as soon as he steps off the plane. Exactly at the same time that Leo XIV was landing at El Prat airport, an incident at Adif's Traffic Control Center in Barcelona left the entire country without commuter trains: R1, R2, R3, R4, R8, R11, R14, R15, R16, R17, RG1, RL3, RL4, RT1, RT2. The service was interrupted for more than half an hour, until it was gradually recovered. And it fell again. Your Holiness, welcome to Catalonia.

The battle for education will have dire consequences for students, families, the teachers who are striking, and, above all, for the protagonists of the negotiation process: on the one hand, the unions, disavowed by their base, and on the other, the Department of Education, which has seen its ups and downs and last-minute concessions prove futile. In short, it is a battle where everyone loses. There will be – indeed – labor improvements for some public servants who certainly deserve them (but they are not the only ones), but the great pending issue, which is the crisis in the educational model, will continue to await better times, times when generosity and a national vision prevail over tactical maneuvering and vested interests.On a political level, the conflict has confirmed the failure of the Illa government's narrative. They sold us good management and a de-escalation of tension, but the times when the PSC boasted of having anesthetized the country are long gone. On the contrary, it has been shown that the problems that, in part, motivated the rise of sovereigntism are still very much alive, although for the moment there is no social movement capable of turning citizen anger into a shock force. The country is as fed up as ever, but it has been deprived of a horizon of change and improvement. And the anger is beginning to give oxygen to those who are always ready to point to the most vulnerable, as victims but also as involuntary accomplices of a productive model that is crushing the social contract and the factors of collective cohesion. To top it all off, the PSC no longer relies on the PSOE's trump card (which is also the anti-PP trump card), because Sánchez's future is becoming clouded by moments.This scenario can entice the PSC's electoral rivals, but precisely the educational crisis should make them see that tactical maneuvering, when faced with the real challenges of the country, is not an option. ERC and CiU have already suffered teacher strikes, and both parties are complicit in the failure of the Catalan school model. It is up to the Government to initiate a new national pact for education, and it is up to the opposition – and the teachers – to have the generosity to get fully involved without thinking about their particular interests, be they electoral, ideological, or corporate.We don't know what would happen today in an election, but we do know that the citizenry is discontent. If the far-right rises, it will be difficult to avoid closer collaboration between the country's central forces –PSC, Junts, ERC, Comuns–, regardless of the number of seats they obtain. Since right now everyone is fighting with everyone, it is civil society that is making proposals (the Informe Fènix" is the clearest example). But, in the long run, institutions must exercise the leadership that corresponds to them. This does not just mean parliamentary consensus; it also means a constituent process to end the abnormality of Catalan political life, which has the theoretical leader of the opposition in exile, independentists disqualified or awaiting trial due to an amnesty that is a wet paper, and all this governed by an Autonomy Statute that has been cut and not ratified by the citizenry.If the PSC wants to lead the country and undertake the great reforms that are increasingly urgent, it now knows that it cannot do it alone. It also knows that its potential allies are sovereigntist or confederalist parties – in any case, parties that challenge the current constitutional framework. This will become even more evident when the PP and Vox reach Moncloa. More sovereignty and more resources are needed to face the present and save the future. Who will dare to oppose this watchword? Fortunately for Salvador Illa, ERC and Junts are too busy sticking their fingers in their eyes and resolving their internal contradictions. One day, however, they will see the handle of the frying pan in front of them.

There is only one positive side from which to look at the conflict between teachers and the Department of Education: it can finally put teaching at the center of the country's concerns.We are not facing another labor conflict, but rather the explosion of corporate discontent resulting from persistent social unrest that has settled in schools. A teacher told me, with her spirits crushed: “Teachers have to face very powerful demands without the corresponding resources. No one dares to say it because it seems like you are attacking inclusive education, but when you have children with behavioral disorders in the same classroom and students who don't understand you at all because they have just arrived, or you know that on the days you go on strike there are children who might miss a hot meal, you feel very unhappy”.For years now, the Catalan school system has been functioning with alarm bells ringing, and precisely for this reason it would be good for everyone to find the right tone. Starting with the Government, which cannot confuse a salary increase with empathy; but continuing with the opposition, because the three largest parties in Parliament have or have had governing responsibilities. And with the unions, which run the risk of losing the social support that the protests initially counted on. It would be the appropriate time to seek a great national agreement. And for this, leadership, courage to commit, and energy are needed to overcome the situation and get out of the loop of mistrust, errors, and complacency. Not many months ago, I wrote here – speaking of teachers, doctors, farmers, and mobility – that we were in national emergency. And this type of emergency can only be overcome with the effort and will of everyone.

A teacher today doesn't just teach. They guide. Tell. Detect. Mediate. Motivate. Manage. Fill out reports. Attend to families. Apply protocols. Adapt to increasingly complex realities. And, amidst all this, they still try to teach.For a long time now, the school has ceased to be solely an institution of instruction. Progressively, it has been assigned social, emotional, and compensatory functions that were previously distributed in other spheres. It is not difficult to understand why: faced with growing social problems, the school is often the last space where there are still adults, time, and a certain structure. In this regard, the announcement of the deployment of police officers in some educational centers is not just a matter of security, but also an indicator of the extent to which the school is assuming functions that go beyond learning. The question is not whether this is legitimate. It probably is. The question is what happens when the school has to do everything.Meanwhile, teacher unrest is growing and public debate tends to read it exclusively in labor terms: salaries, hours, ratios, stability. All of this is important, but perhaps it is insufficient. Because perhaps the problem is not just how much teachers work or earn: perhaps the problem is what we ask them to be.When a profession loses clarity in its role, when its functions expand without clear limits, when responsibilities grow but authority and resources do not keep pace, the result is not just overload: it is a deeper sense of exposure, of unprotectedness, of not having a stable framework from which to operate. Perhaps we have turned the school into the place where all the problems that society does not know or does not want to solve in other areas are managed. And when everything is resolved at school – learning, inclusion, well-being, coexistence, social compensation –, the risk is that the institution loses its center.In classrooms, this translates into constant tension. The teacher is expected to be many things at once, without these functions being well-defined or coordinated. What was once a profession with a clear mission –teaching– becomes a diffuse function, where everything is a priority and, therefore, nothing is entirely so.In this context, the debate often shifts towards teacher training. If the results are not good or the system does not respond, there is a tendency to look at the teacher: they need to be trained more, innovate more, adapt more. But this perspective, although necessary, once again puts the focus on individuals and not on the system. Because there is another, more uncomfortable question: to what extent is the system designed to make viable what it asks for?Perhaps teacher discontent is not an anomaly, but a clue. A clue that indicates that there is something in the way we have redefined school that does not quite fit. And perhaps, before continuing to add new functions to it, we should ask ourselves one more question: what can a school really do... and what can't.