Every beginning of September, the ritual of new backpacks and school texts tries to mask, with a somewhat forced optimism, the deep broken seams of our educational system. However, the return to classrooms no longer allows room for complacency. Those of us who observe the island reality with a mixture of rootedness and concern glimpse that collapse is not a distant threat, but a silent structural crisis that already inhabits the hallways of our educational centers. Recent statistical data only serve to certify what families and teachers denounce on the playground: education in the islands suffers from chronic neglect, materialized in the worst ratios in the Autonomous Community of the Canary Islands.
Technical analyses by the Canary Islands School Council and successive evaluation reports reveal an unsustainable picture: overcrowded classes clearly above the regional average, obsolete infrastructure, and political promises that dissolve in the unexecuted budgets of the Ministry of Education. This local precariousness finds its perfect and tragic international correlate in the PISA Report results, where the Canary Islands historically ranks at the bottom of academic performance in mathematics, science, and reading comprehension, alarmingly widening the socioeconomic gap of our students.
This is not a simple statistical blip. That Lanzarote concentrates the highest index of students per classroom in the archipelago responds to an undeniable lack of demographic foresight in the face of the island's population growth. To expect a teacher to attend to the diversity of realities, social vulnerability environments, and specific support needs within an overcrowded classroom is, in addition to a utopia, a profound irresponsibility. School overcrowding nullifies any attempt at individualized pedagogy.
When the teaching staff's priority shifts to mere order containment instead of intellectual stimulation, the poor results of standardized assessments cease to be a surprise and become a logical consequence.
School failure begins to take shape when a primary school child attends class in temporary barracks (misnamed "modular classrooms") or in degraded centers that lack basic structural maintenance. Added to this is an increasingly evident factor for the educational community: the express digitalization implemented in schools, which far from being the promised technological balm, has seriously deteriorated concentration, executive function, and the comprehension of extensive texts in the early stages of development.
Political homework has been left undone. The constant non-compliance with the Canary Islands Education Law (Law 6/2014), which stipulates that a minimum investment of 5% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) must be guaranteed in the sector, reflects that the childhood and future of our island weigh less than institutional propaganda.
Reversing this trend requires leaving laments behind and applying emergency surgery with concrete measures:
• It is essential that the administration compensate for the historical funding deficit through an extraordinary budget allocation for Lanzarote's school map, aimed at the immediate construction of new centers in the municipalities with the greatest demographic pressure.
• A strict limit of students per group must be decreed, urgently prioritizing areas of high social complexity to curb the socio-educational gap.
• It is time to review the impact of screens in classrooms. We must opt for the priority return to the printed book and manual writing in early childhood and primary education, limiting digital devices to strictly complementary purposes to recover lost reading comprehension levels.
• The consolidation of teaching teams and the structural provision of specialists in attention to diversity (PT, AL) and guidance staff in each center would guarantee an indispensable safety net for students with greater difficulties.
Lanzarote cannot afford to continue normalizing the precariousness of its schools and institutes. If education is the only real social elevator and the pillar on which a society's critical thinking rests, continuing to ignore the alarms from our classrooms will inevitably lead us to social collapse.
Let's firmly demand that the homework be done in the offices so that our young people can finally learn with dignity in the classrooms.
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