The strike in the educational sector, summoned in Catalonia by all the unions, has had this time, in the first of the five planned days, a remarkable following in the public sector. It is closer to the third of the teaching staff that the Department of Education accounts for or to the 75% that the conveners wield. The adherence to the strike by the directors of the centers or the support of family associations such as Affac i Fapaes speak of a real malaise in the educational community (even though be risky to assess to what extent the majority, especially between families).
One of the slogans that could be heard in the demonstration is this: It’s not 5 days of vacation, it’s 10 years of retallades. It is so true that the sum of demands goes far beyond the rejection of the calendar reform, and that teachers are not corporately mobilized not to lose vacation days as they are superficially reproached for – the proposed calendar does not add, or subtract, a day off–, as it is also that The announcement of the early start of the course has been the element that has ended up fueling the protest of the teaching staff. It would be a mistake of the organizers themselves Excessively focusing their demands on the denial of an aspect that can make life easier for families and begin to rationalize the disproportionate summer academic break. They deny that this is the case, but there are too many messages insisting that it is not the responsibility of the school to reconcile family, work and school schedules: facilitating it does not fall solely on the self-organization of families, and the school is one of the resources with those of us who count for it. It is far from being the only or the first function of educational centers. But neither can they be considered oblivious to it.
Teachers find much more understanding in his complaints about overflow they feel when faced with the challenge of coping with the multiple needs of their students and the demand for more means to achieve it. And in his discrepancy with the advance of the start of the 2022-2023 academic year being successful just in a year of curricular change still in the air, and your doubts promises will come true such as early staff appointments or extracurricular activities to compensate for reduced school hours during the month of September. These are measures that must be complied with in order to really start preparing the course in a reasonable time and really benefit families with the change in calendar. Educació maintains that it will comply, and it does not seem that educators are very convinced, rather the opposite, that it will be so. It is largely a matter of trust. And this does not appear anywhere in the tense relationship between the current heads of the department and the representatives of the educational community.
The teachers’ protest goes further and can also be found in a progressive deterioration in the school environment, after two hard years of pandemic. Or in the discrepant positions, among the teachers themselves, especially high school, the change of pedagogical model towards the competency approach. The transfer of much of the responsibility for enforcing court rulings on the use of Catalan to management teams has widened the gap even further. A schedule change can be imposed by the responsible administration without the rejection of the affected professionals preventing it. But there are many more the open fronts in which nowhere is going without effective dialogue which, today, is in dry dock.