We have been immersed for days in the controversy over the parental pin, a kind of virtual button that turns off the educational screen every time parents decide that the content of the subject to be taught in the classroom is not to their liking.
Apart from the dystopian nature of the term -can you imagine a legion of minors receiving online classes from their bedrooms, without needing to take off their pajamas, take a step or interact with others?- the answer that seems most appropriate to me from the hundreds that this demand from VOX has generated is the reduction to the absurd.
I have already read it out there: If the parents are republicans, the child has a day off on the day the monarchies are discussed: if they are communists, no teachings about capitalism; if they are vegans, when it comes to the omnivorous condition of the human being, you stay at home; no history of religions class for schoolchildren from atheist homes and if homophobia is defended in the family, the lesson on sexual diversity is out.
It is evident that teaching is not given à la carte. In this, as in everything, only the wealthiest will be able to choose the center that fits their ideologies and convictions like a glove, in an effort for descendants to inherit and defend family values. The construction of critical thinking and personal judgment seems to be of minor importance among the defenders of the parental pin.
But when it comes to education, as in everything public, it is the citizens who decide by common agreement the design of the educational content. They do so through the ballot box, designating those who will be responsible for the enormous task of training our minors and young people, the pillars of future society.
A society that is diverse and plural, that thinks differently but reaches consensus, that progresses through dialogue, vegans and carnivores, agnostics and religious, republicans and monarchists, heterosexuals and LGTBI?
I am a deputy but I am also a teacher. And I believe that in addition to knowledge and the offer of content, the school teaches students to be independent, to reflect, to have critical thinking, to choose their values and concerns, to react to injustice, to analyze the information they receive daily, to respect, to believe in equality, to love well and to live in peace.
Let's hope that the agreements reached in the governments of Murcia, Andalusia and Madrid do not force us to establish an educational censorship that places us in the universe of Fahrenheit 451? By the way, in the institutes of Lanzarote Ray Bradbury is read from the age of 16. Nothing like literature to face the repression of ideas.
Ariagona González, PSOE deputy
