We are celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Debats d’Educació by giving the educational community the opportunity to air its views
My name’s Alba. I am studying journalism because I believe in the value of telling stories and giving a voice to what happens around us even when it can be so hard to see sometimes. The students’ movement is what has taught me the most when seeking alternatives, finding ways to understand myself and getting others to understand me and taking action for what I believe is right.
A project that is completed with the cooperation of many people offers better results than when we try to do it alone. Distributing the work, coordinating, sharing ideas and correcting errors, making a commitment to the group… All of this is possible with group work. It’s important to create ties in order to face difficulties together even if individual problems are involved in order to gain strength for our demands and demand they be fulfilled.
The current system isolates us from others. They make us believe we get the best out of ourselves when we compete. That only prevents us from bringing our ideas together and realising that we are stronger when joining efforts. Therefore, organising ourselves either through associations or the people around us will allow us to resolve our concerns in addition to being about to offer our own perspective for a common objective.
We have been suffering more than ever lately with counter-reforms that directly attack the right to quality public education: the LOMCE, the Bologna Plan, the 2015 University Strategy... They all move us towards private education and elitism in education, segregation and social divisions between students. All of them are a part of a capitalist education model.
But this is where we have a lot to say: we are the students and we are the ones who must be in control of our education along with the rest of the educational community and that has been demonstrated by the victories of the movements to defend public education such as the strike on the Balearic Islands. The people who experience it day after day are the ones who have broken from the current model and are formulating a proposal as to how and what the people’s education should be - education that fosters autonomous learning and critical thinking in people.
There’s something much more educational than the knowledge established by curricula. One of the best things that can happen to you during the learning process is finding teachers who awaken interests you didn’t even know you had, who teach you much more than you can find in books. Secondary school is a phase that highly influences what and how we are going to be in the future. It’s the time when we develop as people and we must have stimulation that prevents us from being passive towards everything around us but rather makes us learn from observing, analysing, questioning and forming our own view of the world. This realisation is precisely one of the experiences that make university what it is. Students, along with the workers, can and should be the ones to awaken the critical spirit in our colleagues by fostering debate, proposing ideas and participating in self-organised arenas.