If you think education is expensive, try ignorance, said a president of Harvard University. And that is what is happening to us in the Canary Islands, because by not paying attention to the education of our young people, we are gambling with incompetence.
You don't have to be a fortune teller to predict that in five or ten years the Islands, especially the non-capital ones, will continue to import labor while our children, our grandchildren, our nephews and nieces, and the children of our neighborhood, are left with the least qualified jobs. We are witnessing a gradual social, educational and training impoverishment, while we continue to be entertained with speeches full of words, but empty of intention and action.
We have been repeating this reasoning for years, organizing visits, designing plans and talking about the importance of Professional Education for our labor market and for our society. But we have done nothing. In the only Integrated Vocational Training Center of Lanzarote that was achieved after an arduous battle, we have been waiting for four years for the modernization of the center. Each year the items are reflected in the Budgets of the Autonomous Community, but they do not materialize. Where are those responsible? What are the people doing whose job it is to make this happen?
I wonder what is happening in the Canary Islands with Vocational Training so that it does not advance at the rate it should. In a panorama in which companies do not find the necessary human resources for the development of their activity and young people fail to access the labor market, something is being done wrong, very wrong. The youth unemployment rate in the Canary Islands is alarming, above 50% of young people are unemployed, it is the highest in Spain. A worrying fact if we also compare it with European data, where Spain already leads this list approaching 40% unemployment. We are above the worst and we are not seeing it coming.
The only answer I find again and again is the little attention paid to Professional Education and more specifically to VET and the implementation of Dual VET, in which we are already racing against the clock.
Vocational Training in the Canary Islands must have a differentiated space in the educational structure so that it can be treated as it should. The problems that are urgent in Primary and Secondary Education stone VET, relegate it, corner it. And right now we are going through a time when Vocational Training needs special attention to give way to those thousands of young Canarians who cannot find work and to all those companies that cannot find workers.
VET and DUAL VET require their own and specific space and a General Directorate is insufficient. In the Canary Islands, the debate must be opened so that VET has its particular structure, as already exists in other Communities of Spain, within the Ministry of Education, and as the Central Government has also done, which has granted it greater rank within the Ministry, to give it visibility and recognition.
2022 will be the year in which the Vocational Training Law is approved. What are we waiting for in the Canary Islands to realize that we have to stop playing ignorant or pretending that citizens are?
