Good intentions are not enough

Imagine we are in 2029. An association for Canarian identity requests to give a talk at a high school in La Laguna about the Canarian dialect: its history, its roots, what it says about who we are. No politics, no flags. Just words, ours, those brought by the Guanches and the Andalusians and the Portuguese and time.

The Ministry of Education says no.

The reason? The Ministry of Education of the Canary Islands considers it to be of "non-neutral ideology." And non-neutral groups cannot enter classrooms. The rule is clear, it is signed by a far-right minister who has been in office for two years, but it was drafted, at the time, by a progressive ministry that wanted to protect schools from hate speech.

Welcome to the trap that was built with the best intentions.

That is the future that may await us if we do not think more carefully about what the current Ministry of Education wants to introduce for the 2026-2027 school year. The justification is reasonable: to curb far-right groups that were sneaking their discourses into the Archipelago's schools. The management teams themselves, they said, were asking for institutional protection to be able to say no without being left alone in the face of pressure. And that is true, that happens.

But no matter how correct the diagnosis, the medicine must be thought out carefully, because it can turn against us.

Because they decided that the Ministry—whoever it may be in that legislature—would be the one to determine what is neutral and what is not. And "neutral" is one of those words that seems solid until you try to grasp it and it slips through your fingers. Is a talk about feminism neutral? What about one on historical memory? And on the rights of the Canarian people, on our energy dependence, on the tourism model that is consuming our land?

It all depends on who holds the seal. That is the problem.

A tool is what its wielder does, not what its maker promised. The 2026 regulation was conceived to protect classrooms from the far-right, but it is the same regulation that in 2029 the far-right can use to remove what it dislikes from classrooms. Including the Canarian dialect, environmental protection, the history of the Archipelago that is not told in the textbooks of the Spanish State, or sex education. Including everything that, from our land, inconveniences the central power or the local power of the moment.

This is not a science fiction scenario, it is the elementary logic of how rules work when written by today's government without thinking about tomorrow's government.

And in the meantime, management teams, teachers, and families who have spent years building vibrant and engaged educational communities, still have no voice of their own. They continue to wait for someone from above to tell them what they can or cannot do within their own center.

The solution is not another vague rule, nor another new committee invented by the administration. The solution already exists and has a name: the school council.

The school council is in every center. It is made up of the management team, teachers, families, and students. It is a democratic, plural body that knows its community, that knows what its students need and what they don't. If a decision needs to be made about whether an external association can give a talk at the school, the school council should decide. Not the Ministry, not a technician in Santa Cruz who doesn't even know the principal's name.

And with a clear criterion, just one, which does have a legal and moral basis: that the content does not incite hatred or violence. Not against people, not against groups, not against anyone. That is already covered in the legal system, there is no need to invent anything. Just apply it and trust that the educational community is capable of distinguishing between a talk that enriches and a discourse that destroys.

Because it turns out that the teachers of this Archipelago have been doing that every day in their classrooms for decades, without anyone signing an instruction to authorize it.

The underlying question is not how we protect the school from ideologies. The question is who we give the power to decide what enters and what does not. And the answer must be the same as when we talk about real democracy: to those who are closest, to those who know best, to those who have to live with the consequences of that decision.

The Ministry can set the framework —without hatred, without violence, without discrimination— and then step aside. Let the centers decide, let the communities decide, let them trust, once and for all, the people who have the children in front of them every morning.

Or we continue to build tools that today point where we want and tomorrow point at us. And then, when someone wants to talk about the Canarian dialect in a classroom and cannot, let's not say we didn't see it coming.