Spain will kick off the new year with its eighth educational reform in four decades. And it will do so with the same political and ideological bitterness that marked all the previous ones. The passage through the Senate of the Organic Law of Modification of the LOE (Lomloe), better known as the Celaá law, which replaces the Wert law , has not managed to attenuate in the least the division between right and left with which there was already out of Congress.The Senate on Wednesday gave final approval, without changing a comma, to the text that the lower house ratified a month ago and that will now enter into force within 20 days. The government and its allies - ERC and PNV - rejected up to 650 amendments, a way to prevent the bill from having to return to Congress to receive the final green light. The approval counted on 142 favorable votes, 112 against and 9 abstentions.
The Minister of Education, Isabel Celaá, welcomed the end of an "exclusive, segregated and elitist" rule, alluding to the Wert law , and assured that her project respects "freedom of education." "It is a law in favor of everyone, not against anyone," he said. Regarding the hints of the PP that it will avoid applying the norm in the communities where it governs, the minister pointed out: "We are in a state of law, I cannot even imagine that an autonomous community decides not to comply with the law." Should that occur, he hinted that he will go to court: "Ultimately, the judiciary will know how to enforce it."
On the last day of the parliamentary procedure in the upper house, the representatives of ERC Adelina Escandell and Junts Assumpció Castellví passed through the rostrum, and both boasted: "In Catalonia we have had a law for years with broad consensus." Then the senator of the Regionalist Party of Cantabria (PRC) José Miguel Fernández Viadero came up and said: "In my community we passed a law unanimously." And later it was the turn of the Aragonese Party, Clemente Sánchez-Garnica, who completed: "And we too." But national politics is something else, attached to what has already become a Spanish classic: the furious fighting every time an educational reform is approached. "I get a little depressed," confessed Fernando Clavijo, from Coalición Canaria. “In almost 50 years we have been unable to overcome the ideological divide on something so decisive for the future of our children. I have a daughter who is not yet a high school graduate and is already on the third law ”.
The final debate in the Senate led to the umpteenth turn of the screw to that ideological discussion, with digressions on issues such as the approval of women's suffrage in the Second Republic or the role of Lluís Companys in the Civil War. All this mixed with the partisan struggle before the next elections in Catalonia. What was talked about the most - almost the only issue in the case of Ciudadanos - was the coexistence between different languages, once the Government, after agreeing with ERC, withdrew the express mention of the “vehicular” character of Spanish . When more than five hours of debate had already been consumed, the senator from Más País Eduardo Fernández Rubiño exclaimed with some boredom: "Why are we talking about these things and not about education?"
The right, with the support of Ciudadanos, insisted on its ominous predictions about the consequences that the law will have for subsidized schools and special education. There were, of course, allusions to religion and, on the part of Vox, also to sexual education. The PP rose to steep apocalyptic heights: the law is "a nightmare", according to Senator Pablo Ruz, and is "a direct affront against all the good that we have built as a society, against all the good of a millenary nation."
Those arguments that the opponents of the law have agitated during their parliamentary process and transferred to protests in the street respond, according to the socialist Txema Oleaga, to the "Pinocchio principle." "Lies and more lies," accused Oleaga, who claimed that it was a government of his party that created concerted education in Spain. The socialists, the rest of the left and the nationalists also worked to deny that special education is going to be dismantled or that Castilian is in danger of disappearing somewhere. "The right wing agitates four phantom threats: the concerted, religion, Spanish and special education", Fernández Rubiño summed up with irony.
But Minister Isabel Celaá, who attended the debate in the solitude of the blue bank, also had to hear harsh criticism from groups that usually support the government. The reason, the rapid processing of the text in the Senate - which had a deadline until the end of February - and the roll with which the majority overthrew each and every one of the amendments. Not only those against the law, but also other groups who ended up voting in favor or abstaining and who defended issues such as expanding the presence of ethics, classical culture or philosophy in the school curriculum. If any amendment had been accepted, the text would still have to return to Congress before going into effect.
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