Arrecife wakes up and many families get going to go to school. Calle La Inés, in the center of Arrecife, is absolutely busy due to the educational centers that are on one side and the other of the street. It turns out that at approximately 8:15 am there is a curious crossing of uniforms that might seem anecdotal but is much more significant than we usually think. Racialized families walk to the left and white families walk to the right. Same ages but separated by ethnicity and social class.
School segregation is one of the great dramas facing educational policies and has serious repercussions in Lanzarote. Today there is a clear concentration of vulnerable students in very specific centers and students from middle classes, if they still exist, and high in religious schools of a private or subsidized nature. All this despite the fact that the LOMLOE already moved some pieces to prohibit exclusion in private centers maintained with public money (subsidized) and the prohibition of any collection of fees in them. Everything fits on paper, the problem is that it is the dynamics of society itself, classist in many cases, that push for the separation of students. There is nothing more classist than not wanting to study collectively with poor boys and girls.
Separating students by ethnicity, religion and mainly by social class is a clear anomaly that has serious negative repercussions for democratic society. How are we going to build a plural and diverse society if the children themselves do not even grow up together? This fact affects the supports of social justice without which the maintenance of democracy in our country would not be understood. The maintenance of subsidized religious centers with public money is another form of inequality that is born from the depths of the administration and that takes root through simplistic ideological positions that appeal to an absurd concept of freedom.
The school, and specifically in Lanzarote, will not develop the transforming role that it should, and that is demanded of it without sufficient resources, if we do not achieve a fair and egalitarian school. School segregation, according to experts such as Pedro González de Molina Soler in his Report on School Segregation and the educational model of the right in Spain, will cause major problems of a democratic nature and will worsen overall academic results, thus causing a false positive perception of meritocracy that hides the social causes of failure. In short, an unfair and sad society that can only aspire to maintain the invisible walls that are observed with sufficient attention in the morning traffic of Calle La Inés.
