Education is one of the main competences of the Autonomous Communities and in the Canary Islands to a greater extent, if possible, because we started from precarious conditions in terms of illiteracy, schooling, infrastructure, doubled centers, school failure, teacher and teacher-student ratios and so on, at the time of the transfers made by the state.
At that time, the Canarian parties demanded an educational model based on the reality of our archipelago and not on the one existing at that time in the State of Spain, designed in Madrid and excluding the Canarian reality.
Over the years and with much effort from the different councils and councilors, teachers, parents' associations, unions, professional organizations, significant progress has been made that culminated in 2014, with the approval of the Canarian Education Law, through a popular legislative proposal presented in the Parliament of the Canary Islands, by a wide range of groups and with more than 36,000 thousand signatures, in 2010. This Law was approved by the Plenary of the Parliament of the Canary Islands in 2014, with the support of the Socialist, Nationalist and New Canary Parliamentary Groups, and with the rejection of the Popular Group.
Many of us within nationalism defend the need for Coalición Canarias, Nueva Canarias and other nationalist parties with insular involvement to take a step forward and apply themselves to the task of Canarian national construction, not only with a discourse for the gallery, but with a national identity project, committed to our way of being,
defending, without ambiguities, our own educational, cultural and communicative structures. In this last section, it is a pity that the Canarian Academy of Language, which took so much work to set up, has not had the decisive support, as it deserves, from the successive Governments of the Canary Islands.
It is regrettable, from my point of view, that after forty years of autonomy and with the competences in Education by the Government of the Canary Islands, and despite the progress made, we have not been able to launch the foundations of the Canarian School that marks our progress as a people, with Canarian Contents adjusted to our reality and the defense of our idiosyncrasy.
On November 12, 2012, before the Plenary of the Parliament of the Canary Islands, in my intervention as spokesperson for education of the Canarian Nationalist Group during the debate on Taking into Consideration the Popular Initiative for a Canarian Education Law, I asked: "I ask for a great pact for Canarian education to avoid the image that with political alternation, the bases, the structures, of a field as sensitive as education in our community are also changed." This was not only my feeling, but that of the majority of educational representatives, including the School Council of the Canary Islands.
I link this intervention with the results of the Elections of May 28 of the current year. The results made it necessary to configure pacts to achieve the governability of our community, which is logical and normal in these times.
It is not the intention of these lines to analyze the decisions taken by each political party to achieve the necessary stability during the next four years, but I consider that there were other options for a progressive pact in our community, such as the one signed on the island of Fuerteventura with the CC-PSOE Pact.
What is striking is the distribution made by the President of the Government of the Canary Islands, in the allocation of the areas that correspond to each partner. And here is my astonishment. Coalición Canaria, a nationalist party, agrees within the distribution of the areas that the Ministry of Education is the responsibility of the Popular Party.
A nationalist party gets rid of one of the most sensitive areas within the organization chart of the Government of the Canary Islands! And not only gets rid of it, but puts it on a platter to the Popular Party. And as Carmelito, an endearing character, created by the friend and humorist Morgan, would say: "where has that ever been seen". I certainly don't understand it.
A Nationalist party that says in the Preamble of its Statutes "CC is a political, nationalist and progressive organization with a federal structure whose fundamental objectives are the consolidation by democratic means of the Canary Nation, as well as the recognition and defense of identity as a sovereign people integrated in a plurinational conception of the State and a firm Europeanist sentiment." This nationalist party is the one that leaves the management of Canarian education in the hands of the Popular Party.
Let us remember that the Popular Party imposed the Organic Law for the improvement of educational quality (LOMCE) also called Wert Law, in "honor" of the surname of the imposing minister; remember that it has been one of the most contested and controversial laws by all sectors related to education in the last forty years; the party that voted against the Canarian Education Law; the party that eliminates competences to the school councils of the educational centers, enhancing the competences of the directors and subtracting them to the School Councils, which supports concerts with the public administration to the
centers that opt for differentiation by sex, which clearly supports the subsidized schools against the public ones and the postulates of the Catholic Church.
With these antecedents, I certainly show my concern for the drift that education in the Canary Islands may take in the next four years.
I have fought, together with a large number of colleagues, as a teacher and then from the positions of responsibility that I have held, to have an education in accordance with the needs of our people, within our commitment as nationalists, first, seeking to get out of the backwardness to which the Spanish state condemned us with an educational system that marginalized our islands, ignoring the distance, illiteracy rate and our peculiarities. Later, we fought to launch and then consolidate the progress that has been made thanks to the efforts of everyone: levels of schooling, budgets, infrastructure, school failure, curriculum, etc. These achievements have been taking place over the last few years, but we believe that we still have a lot to advance and maintain an important cruising speed to achieve it, first with the development and application of the Canarian Non-University Education Law, endowed with the necessary budget items, to reach 5% of GDP, as stated in it.
Mr. Minister of Education, Vocational Training, Physical Activity and Sports, you are in charge of a very sensitive ministry for all Canarians and, even finishing writing these lines, I do not believe that the President of the Government and Secretary General of Coalición Canaria, Mr. Fernando Clavijo, has made such a blunder with our education, putting it in the hands of his party.
Dear Poli, I want to think that the President's strategy is to take you to a dead end and make you responsible for the conflicts that the application of postulates defended, in previous times, by your party and a management of education that he and the sector most akin to the dictates of the Popular Party, read the descendants of the old ATI,
want to introduce based on the commitments of the distribution of the pact, to impose them under the table,
Nationalism yes; pacts also, but distributions at the expense of taking steps backwards in education in the Canary Islands No, please.
Nicolás Gutiérrez Oramas. Insular Director of the Ministry of Education in Fuerteventura. (2006-2011)
