“When we open real spaces for participation, children and youth respond. They do so with responsibility, with creativity, and with an enormous capacity to think about the common good”
“While adults try to teach children how the world works, they are the ones who end up reminding us how it should work”
Something happens to me every time I share a table with children. I leave with the feeling that, while adults try to teach them how the world works, they are the ones who end up reminding us how it should work.
I'm talking about that conviction that childhood has that almost everything can be resolved by talking. About their curiosity to listen before responding or to ask without malice, about the certainty that any idea deserves to be heard when it is born from the desire to improve things.
Perhaps it is because they have not yet learned to distrust. Or perhaps because they retain something that many adults leave behind on the way: the belief that dialogue always deserves a chance.
That way of understanding human relationships should also inspire politics.
In San Bartolomé, we have wanted to turn that conviction into a way of working. That is why we have promoted the Municipal School Council, where the educational community has a permanent space to share proposals and continue improving our schools and the educational environment.
We have also established the first Children's Council in the municipality, giving a voice to 21 school representatives elected by nearly 200 classmates from 5th grade of Primary to convey their concerns and proposals. And we have once again witnessed the enormous commitment of our youth with a new edition of the Youth Participatory Budgets, in which 879 students from the IES of San Bartolomé and Playa Honda actively participated to decide which actions they consider priorities for their municipality.
The data speaks for itself. When we open real spaces for participation, children and youth respond. They do so with responsibility, with creativity, and with an enormous capacity to think about the common good. They never arrive asking who is going to win a debate. They arrive asking how they can improve what concerns them.
That is the path we want to continue to follow. The candidacy of San Bartolomé to become a Child-Friendly City does not respond solely to the desire to obtain recognition. It represents a firm commitment to a way of governing that places childhood at the center of public policies.
In that same vein, we continue to promote actions that make inclusion a daily reality: the installation of pictograms in educational centers to promote accessibility, permanent collaboration with parent associations, the development of participatory projects from classrooms, or joint work with the educational community to build a more inclusive, more accessible municipality committed to the rights of children.
None of this would be possible without public education committed to the formation of citizenship. Because school does not only teach mathematics, language, or science. It teaches how to live together, respect differences, work in teams, and understand that dialogue is always more useful than confrontation. That is where a way of understanding democracy begins, which goes far beyond voting every so often.
As mayor of San Bartolomé, I am convinced that the progress of a municipality is not measured solely by the infrastructure it builds or the services it provides. It is also measured by its proposals for forming people committed to their environment, capable of listening, dialoguing, and reaching agreements.
Perhaps that is why I continue to believe that politics should never lose sight of childhood. That which reminds us that all people have something valuable to contribute, that listening never subtracts, and that the future is always built better when no one is left out of the conversation.
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