a hundred of students has cut this Wednesday morning the Diagonal avenue of Barcelona, at the height of Palau Reial, to show your rejection of the new state university law, known as ‘Castells law’. With a banner with the slogan ‘We stop the Castells law’, they have sung proclamations against this rule, which must be approved soon. They consider the norm an “attack” on the educational system of the Catalan Countries and warn of the risk of turn education into a “commodity” because it opens the doors of universities to companies. The protest has been reproduced on the AP-7, in front of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB).
The traffic cut in Barcelona has lasted about an hour, after a mediation between students and police forces. During the time that the traffic cut lasted, some drivers resigned, while others tried skipping the cut by putting pressure on the protesters.A “direct attack”
The SEPC spokeswoman, Marta Daviu, has affirmed that the Castells law is being sold as progressive but that it is a “direct attack” on the public university system. He assured that the text allows private companies to enter the system and “gain power.” Daviu has accused the Minister of Universities, Manuel Castells, of not “wanting to listen to the student movement from his office in Moncloa” and has assured that it is not a consensus norm since not only the university students but also the rectors oppose it.
For this reason, he has demanded “coherence” from the political parties and to be together with the university community in this fight. “That they vote against, it is minimal to be against a law that treats education as a commodity and not as a right,” he said. Daviu has irrigation
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University students criticize, for example, that every time there are more subjects in English, to the detriment of Catalan. On the other hand, they also oppose the university coexistence law, a regulation that they see as “repressive and sanctioning.”
The protest has been the prelude to the strike called on December 16 against the state regulation. The government approved the draft of the new university law last August and it is now pending approval in Congress.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com