We are living in difficult times and the field of education is especially suffering from this crisis. Since the beginning of the recession, we are seeing how hundreds of teachers lose their jobs, how thousands of children ...
We are living in difficult times and the field of education is especially suffering from this crisis. Since the beginning of the recession, we are seeing how hundreds of teachers lose their jobs, how thousands of children see the conditions in which they receive their education diminished... And how, and this is the most disappointing thing, some of the changes that come camouflaged in the crisis, disguised as cuts, are of an ideological nature.
Reforms in which the economy of each family is taken more into account than the needs of the students. That skew opportunities based on business interests to, supposedly, achieve a more useful education... Useful for whom? That attack public education to clearly benefit private, fundamentally religious, education. That raise the cost of university fees to levels inaccessible to many people, forcing them to abandon their studies, breaking their dreams into pieces and raising a wall in front of their aspirations for the future. In short, they are taking advantage of the crisis to end education as a right of citizens and want to turn it into just another business, a privilege.
I bet on education. For an education that forms and does not indoctrinate. An education that does not discriminate or separate boys and girls in the classrooms. An education that prepares our children in the present and for the future instead of making us go back more than 30 years. A comprehensive education that forms people with values, with aptitudes and with attitudes that make them capable of resolving any situation that life presents them. That provides us with qualified professionals, not obedient and cheap labor.
That is why I believe that the Cabildo has the moral duty to help the students of Lanzarote and this is the reason why each year a call for study grants and another for transport aid is opened. Insularity and double insularity pose an extra difficulty that, when the screws are tightened in other concepts as they are doing, can become an insurmountable barrier for many families. More and more... With the scholarships we try to provide them with a ladder.
We are at a time when we must counteract these retrograde, stale and counterproductive measures because, if they go ahead, their effect would be to leave us with generations deprived of the right to education and that would not be recovered by either time or money. We have no right to deprive an entire generation of boys and young people of education.
*Emma Cabrera Toribio, Councilor for Education and Culture of the Cabildo de Lanzarote.